If I had money - would I work?

Big, fat NO!

Whenever you discuss the idea of getting wealthy enough that you wouldn't have to work - some people say that they would still work. You are getting an extra 40 hours (or more if you count commuting time) per week to spend on doing whatever takes your fancy - and you're going back to the office?

Personally I would start by having a few months off. After close to three decades of having to get up every morning to go to school / work - I would love to live off the clock for a while. I'm sure that moseying around the house would get a bit less shiny eventually, but there are so many things one could spend time on.

Healthy stuff like going to the gym 3 times per week and cooking food from scratch - I'm sure these kinds of things would feel much less of a chore if you weren't trying to fit them in around work.

Courses - horse riding, Italian, archery, fencing, psychology, sewing - all those interesting things that it is difficult to find the time for.

And I would definitely sign up with a local amateur musical theatre group. At the moment I am wary of the time commitment needed for this. I did a lot of amateur theatre at university, so I know the amount of time required to get a performance to happen. You might start with only one evening of rehearsals per week, but as the opening night gets closer another night gets added and some weekend workshops. And you might need to help out with work on the sets or costumes, depending on how many off stage people are involved. To fit that around work and other hobbies can be tricky. But if you are not working it is easy. :-)

Time management envy

Imagine a life where you do your work - I know, you'd rather imagine one without work, but let's be realistic.

Anyway, so you work, you go to the gym regularly, every evening you make dinner from scratch with nice fresh ingredients and lots of yummy vegetables. You cleanse and moisturise twice a day, your house is clean and tidy and bed linen gets changed like clockwork. AND you have spare time to fill with hobbies and socialising.

That is what I want to be like. I am seriously envious of people that manage their time well enough to achieve all of these things.

Personally, I have a very low willpower threshold for boring stuff (like household chores) - so the obvious solution is to win the lottery so I can hire a cook and a cleaner. ;-)

There is yet time

Turning 30 passed me by without a hitch. We were busy buying our first house together and I'd recently changed jobs, so there was lots of things happening. Then the year after came the proposal and the wedding planning started for the year after that. However, things have been kind of slow since then and that was the main thing that hit me as I was about to turn 35.

I am boring!!

I used to always be so busy, doing this, that and the other. But when you work full time (at least in London) it is so easy to allow yourself to not do a lot. You get up in the morning, do your 1 hour commute, work, commute home for 1 hour, stick in a wash, have some dinner and then there's not an awful lot left of the evening. On the weekend you have to do all those chores that cannot be done during evenings - more washing, cleaning the house, shopping, mowing the lawn etc etc

And that's of course why WoW fits in so perfectly as a hobby. You play from your house, so no travelling to and from other places in the evening. It can take up as much or as little time as you want it to. I'm not saying WoW is a bad hobby, in spite of the end of expansion blues I still have a huge bucket list I aim to get through before Azeroth gets terra-formed by the coming Cataclysm.

But there are so many other things that I keep thinking I'd like to do, that I never get around to. Taking a course in something, writing, visiting the Fringe - once I started thinking about it the list kept growing.

There are lots of very good excuses for not doing these things, but they are just that - excuses.

Starting singing lessons was a great first step. Yes, with my slightly wonky work schedule it will require some planning to make it work. But in return I get to do something I really, really enjoy AND it gives me buzzy energy that makes me want to do more things.

Of course there is a limit to how much I can actually fit in. With working full time, commuting and doing all that boring adult stuff, I cannot be out and about most evenings of a week as I will then feel over stretched and exhausted. So I will keep my singing lessons, I will try to write something each week and once that is part of my routine I might consider adding one more thing to the mix.

Because, you know what, there is yet time - I don't have to do it all at once.

Scruples according to Lula

"You know what your problem is? You've got too many scruples. One or two scruples is okay, but you get too many of them, and it clogs everything up."

"I got some scruples, but I know when to stop. There's a point where you have to say enough is enough and screw scruples."

"There you go with the scruples again. You gotta learn a real scruple from a worthless scruple."

Lula is a recurring character in Janet Evanovich's books about Stephanie Plum, bounty hunter less than extraordinaire. She is one of my favourite characters in that series of books. From evanovich.com: "A black woman with a rubenesque body and a Vegas wardrobe that’s four sizes too small. She’s a former ‘ho working as a file clerk at Vinnie’s office and wheelman for Stephanie."

I stumbled across these books many years ago in an English-language bookshop in Rome of all places. They had the three first ones (One for the Money, Two for the Dough, Three to get Deadly) and I just loved the cover art and I bought all three on the spot.

Summary of the first book from Wikipedia:

"Stephanie Plum  is out of a job and there isn’t much work for an ex-lingerie buyer. After caving under pressure from her mother, Stephanie goes to her cousin, Vinnie, who is a bail bondman for some filing work. When arriving Vinnie’s assistant, Connie, tells her that the filing position has been filled. Connie tells her about apprehending people who skip out on their bonds, pulls a file out of her top drawer, and shows her Joseph Morelli’s file. Morelli is a vice cop who is wanted for murder one and has a history with Stephanie which includes two sexual encounters in high school and a hit-and-run when he didn’t call afterward. Connie suggests Morelli because Stephanie will get percentage of the bond that sings to the tune of $10,000. Stephanie has had to pawn off the majority of her possessions and her car gets repossessed, she thinks bringing in Morelli will fix all of her financial problems.

Stephanie decides she wants to join up and blackmails Vinnie about an incident with a duck in order to let her try to get Morelli. With the help of some friends and the best bounty hunter in the business, Ranger, she slowly learns what it takes to be a badass bounty hunter. Along the way of trying to find Morelli Stephanie gains the unwanted attention of a heavy weight boxer that has a history of making women disappear, gains some hookers as friends, steals Morelli’s car, and enters into an agreement with Morelli himself. Then on top of all that she still has to deal with a pushy mother, a crazy grandmother, and a father who would rather not watch.

It's one hell of a way to spend the first two weeks on the job."

Stephanie is a great main character. She is actually quite normal in the sense that she barely knows one end of a gun from another and has to make things up as she goes along. From what little impressions I've had of New Jersey and the people that live there - she is a Jersey girl through and through. This means that she gets through scary and embarrasing situations on pure attitude (and a fair amount of comfort food). The other characters in the books are slightly insane in different ways, but it all kind of works - though I now probably have a very skewed idea of New Jersey life.

I've got every single Plum book that's been published and have just finished the latest one (Sizzling Sixteen). Unfortunately I have to say that they are not as good as they used to be. The problem is that each book is based on the same formula. Stephanie gets or stumbles upon a case that is way out of her league, but with help from friends and family (including her 2 beaus Joe Morelli & Ranger) she somehow manages to get through the ordeal and solve things.

There's nothing wrong with the formula per se, but it feels like the main characters are not developing any more. The last few books have all been the same. It is like the characters are in stasis. And that's a shame - because they are good characters.

I have seen reviewers of the later books on Amazon commenting on that you would kind of expect that after 16 books (and that's only the main ones, not counting novellas etc) - Stephanie would have more of a clue of what she is doing. The other main comment is - two guys want her and she can't make up her mind? After all this time surely they would have both moved on to someone else.

I can live with the fact that Stephanie is pretty much still as clueless as she was when she started, but I agree that the love life angle is getting very stale. I can understand that the author doesn't want to resolve it, because Steph in a stable relationship would be very different and it might not work out.

All in all, I highly recommend the first three books. The ones after that are good but I would caution against reading them back to back as with any formula-based books you can overdose. As for the later ones, it'll depend on how much you enjoy them I guess. I read them as they come out once a year and enjoy the light entertainment, but I do also miss the darker, more character-based plots from the earlier ones.

Moar gadgets or How I learned to love Apple

So the work purchase of iPads fell through. There aren't that many of us and some people didn't want one. *boggle*

Not that I would buy one, but if someone wants to give you a new, shiny gadget to use - there is only one answer. Surely?

With my singing lessons I've gotten back into listening to music so I decided it might be time to invest in one of them new-fangled empeethree majiggies. Now I am not an Apple fan (it all comes back to a very traumatic experience with an Apple laptop in university - it frowned at me. Long story.), but looking around iPods are kind of the standard fare when it comes to mp3-players. They may or may not be the best, but they seem to be the standard others are judged against. This feature on this player is better than the iPod, that feature on that player is not as good as the iPod. There are a lot of players out there and as a first-time buyer it is a bit of a jungle, so I ended up deciding to just get an iPod and be done with it. My husband used to have an iPod Nano and he was very happy with it and the audio quality. Seeing as he is very sensitive to audio quality and I'm not - that was good enough for me.

So off we went to the Apple store to buy a pair of iPod Touches. Out we came with iPods, bits of plastic to protect the screens, colourful back protectors and headphones (I hate in-ear headphones). After assembling them and having a play for a whole minute or two, we were both completely in love. The interface is so intuitive, what with the scrolling up and down, side to side and the resizing by moving your fingers together or outwards. The responsiveness of the touchscreen is spot on. There may very well be products out there that are better, but I love my iPod Touch to bits already.

And that is before even using it for what I bought it for - to play music...

Today I spent part of my commute watching an episode of a TV show on it and I was seriously impressed. I've always thought that watching something on such a small screen would be a bit pointless, but I was wrong. The quality was great, the picture was really sharp and I got completely sucked in - it came as a bit of a surprise when the train pulled into the station.

Loving it, would recommend it and I will probably get an iPhone when it comes time to replace my current mobile. Yes, I like it that much.