St Andrews

Price: $4.19
Want to learn more about St Andrews, the Home of Golf and one of Europe’s finest small towns? This app will help you enjoy the key sights in this historic and beautiful place.

Buy it from the Apple Store

Invisible Paris

Price: $2.59
Paris is the most visited city in the world, but how many people ever get to the real heart of the place?

These tours won’t take you to the traditional tourist areas but will show you a different side of the city, an invisible side where ordinary people live and work, but which nevertheless is filled with fascinating places and incredible stories.

The walks feature full descriptions of points of interest as well as a map and a selection of original photos. Each walk is based around a particular theme, and generally in a limited geographical area.

Buy it fromt he Apple Store

The single biggest lifestyle change I have made since starting my new Life Regime, is freezing meals.

It is the BEST THING since sliced bread (which, being full of carbs, is apparently not quite as good as it’s cracked up to be!).

Here’s why:

On a bad week, I cook two large pots of things on a Saturday or Sunday (these days may vary depending on activities). Spices are my new best friend and it is literally a source of constant wonder to me how many variations of flavors you can get. I now truly believe that anyone who has experimented with spices will probably wind up being an enthusiastic chef. It’s like a science experiment in your own kitchen and the sense of achievement you feel when you re-create one of your favorites without the aid (and disappointment) of a jar or can is pretty darn good.

Anyway, I also cook the right portions or rice and/or mashed kumera/pasta and bust out 5-10 of my wonderful storage containers and a little slop, and little stacking and into the freezer they go.

Which means that for the whole ENTIRE rest of the week, including cold nights, busy days, sicknesses, gathering at a friends house for dinner and any number of other times that I would have (in the dark old days) raced by a takeaway shop, I literally WHIP something out of my trusty old freezer. Each meal is PERFECTLY portioned to have the right combo of meat, veges and carbs and whatever else you’re meant to eat, and is actually yummier and EASIER to get to than any takeaway I can think of.

It gets better though, because over the course of a couple of weeks, you build up several different meals, you can be eating something pretty different at each meal, so you never get bored… And EVEN better! Now Nadine has re-introduced me to the wonderous world of Feta cheese, in 5 extra minutes, you can put together a salad to go with your meal that will change your very notion of what the combination of lettuce, tomatoes and other tasteless veges can achieve. I honestly believe I am eating the best I have ever eaten (outside of when i lived with my parents and had a full time chef on hand – thanks mum!)

Now I have discovered this, I feel sorry for this lovely lady, who has been doing a lot of travelling and as a result was struggling with finding healthy food. I have also heard other people complain that they simply do not have TIME to cook healthy meals every day (and I remember telling myself this same story for years.) It is just so easy to fix!

Frozen meals (and it is surprising what you can freeze) take a while to defrost. So even if you don’t have a fridge handy, if you are going to need dinner on the run, you can have the food out all day without it going scummy.

Revolutionary!

UPDATE: A cooking demo by the wonderful Julia fits nicely with my cooking philosophy!

This is actually not my idea and I know I will be KILLED for claiming this as something I found, but I do think (outside of the creations I’m involved in of course…) that this is the best iPhone app ever.

Why?

Because First Aid is something that we should all know and pretty much all don’t.

Emergency situations are something we should all be prepared for, but let’s be honest, when you are actually in one, who is to say your mind wont go 100% blank or that you will be unable to do anything for fear of doing something wrong?

What an absolutely brilliant thing to have on you – a quick reference guide you can have on hand IF ONLY to give you the confidence of someone with a reference guide on hand.

It’s actually not as uncommon as you might think to be thrust into a life or death situation and even if you do the fullblown 2 day course (without being so bored that your mind closes for the majority of it), staying up to date on the latest best practises and even remembering the basics can be a struggle for those of us with brains like sieves.

So get it now

A group of us were talking the other day and one of the topics was our 5 year plan.

I’m not sure I have one.

I have a rough idea of where I want to be but the goalposts keep moving. In 5 years, I don’t need 2.5 kids, a husband, a house and a dog (actually yes, the dog will probably be there), but I do need to be happy.

So it was nice to read this article from someone who has clearly gone places, that it’s actually ok, or even GOOD not not have a plan for life all the time.

I also wonder how many people think of the downsides to goals – especially those like being married and having kids – the ones you have limited control over. NOT achieving these goals can be quite upsetting, and I wonder how many people get themselves into a muddle trying to achieve them on time and doing things for the wrong reasons to hit the marks they feel need hitting at various points in time.

And NOT having goals doesn’t necessarily make you unable to get up in the morning, it just leaves life open for a little surprise every now and then. I know as soon as I consciously decided to stop setting exercise goals and just exercised for the fun of it, I actually progressed a lot faster.

I also know when I’ve had a single minded focus on a goal (i.e keeping this business going) I have made sacrifices that looking back with the benefit of hindsight I would have made if I hadn’t narrowed my target to just one thing and to be honest I would probably be doing something pretty similar anyway, without all the fallout.

The idea of anti-goal setting seems counter intuitive, but it could have something going for it…

I love this Post Secret postcard.

It’s a big wide world out there and sometimes it’s not hard to feel a little invisible. It’s always nice to be reminded that while people never say it enough, you probably have more effect on more people than you realise.

It also makes you think of all those incredible people you pass by in life, who you never quite get around to telling how much you admire.

Maybe we should all be a little more vocal with our compliments, but in the meantime, if you’re having a rough time of it, take this postcard out of the PostSecret book and stick it to your wall.

So I got a stomach bug over the weekend and was non-functional yesterday.

It’s been so long since I have been sick that I didn’t plan for this, and when I got better enough to stop feeling sorry for myself, it got me thinking.

What do people with CHILDREN do when they are wiped out? I physically couldn’t function, what would I do if I had a baby crying for me?

Then today, despite feeling rubbish and knowing that it was going to be a nightmare of a day, I got out of bed and came to work. Because I hadn’t planned for a sick day, I was so behind from yesterday that I simply could not NOT turn up without letting a lot of people down even more than my non-starting yesterday. My brain was functioning JUST ENOUGH and I have trained myself JUST ENOUGH that I think I am able to go to meetings, churn through my to-dos and get stuff done when other people would still be in bed.

Which made me think that owning a business probably gives me an indication of what I’m in for with kids. You sometimes have to just toughen up and not give into the little moaning minnie in your head that is saying ‘please please please leave me alone I want to DIE’, and get up and get going.

Yet another reminder of how much power our brains have over us and the power of not having another option but to get out of bed :)

I read a post on Stuff this morning about irrational fears. HILARIOUS.

It made me laugh so hard at all the things that I am actually afraid of that I have been afraid of since I was a kid, and have now trained myself to believe is normal. My irrational fears:

• Dangling my legs over my bed when sleeping. I’m now 99.9% sure there are no boogiemen under there, but NO WAY am I going to find out
• Sharks AND stingrays. Yup, even in the shallows.
• Popping corks on bottles of bubbly. I’m CONVINCED they’re going straight into my eyes.
• Automatic doors

And those are just the ones from the top of my head… It makes you wonder how we even get through the day with all the stupid irrational fears we have!

Power Kiwi is hitting Facebook and we are so keen to make friends, we are willing to BUY your love.

So… Our first 200 ‘likes’ on Facebook go into the draw to get a $100 top up on their Powershop account.

So simple, and this is just the beginning! We have big plans to make small differences to your cost of living, so if $100 isn’t enough of a temptation to like me, I promise, there will be plentry more incentives coming your way via our Flower Power Facebook page in the near future.

I got my yearly Kiwisaver tax certificate yesterday.

It’s amazing how much it grows, despite the fact that I was on the automatic ASB conservative fund.

And, once again proving that all you need to do to get customers thinking about you, is to contact them every now and then, I’ve launched into ‘adjustment of Kiwisaver’ mode.

Firstly, I’m switching to Gareth Morgans scheme. I have only heard good things about it and him, and I think his scheme is the only one that made any actual money last year (am I wrong?)

Secondly, I switched from Conservative to a mixture of growth and balanced (slightly favoring growth)… I enjoy immensely the different perspectives on ‘risky’ – when you own a business nothing quite cuts it in terms of ‘risk’

Thirdly, I am wondering if I am better of to withdraw it all and throw it on my mortgage? I keep hearing that you should get rid of debt asap, but I’m not sure if a couple of thousand dollars will do an awful lot?

I have a major fear that if I do anything the Government will find out and change the law so as we no longer get tax credits etc unless we left al our money in there.

One good thing about being in a small business is that you have a lot more control over WHO you work with and you actually build up a fairly substantial list of ‘workmates’… And because you wind up working fairly closely with partners and customers, you build quite solid relationships with them. So you manage to avoid the boring water cooler conversation (that I can’t understand how people find time for), while taking advantage of the support and connections that make the world go round.

It does get tough when you are doing your accounting though. I know some friends have questioned by ‘business entertainment’ at times… And now laugh that every time I go out, I either wind up drumming up a new lead or bumping into an old customer and start talking about work again. In my mind, life is different when you own the company. You NEVER stop working, and you survive off any networking you do.

But, am I the only one who often finds the line blurred between having a good time with friends and doing business with work colleagues?

I know a lot of people would say that if it’s fun, it’s not work, but I feel like that myth was dispelled the day I started working for myself and basically spend my life doing stuff I like (and get severely depressed when I go through a couple of months of NOT leaping out of bed to get cracking).

The I wonder if it’s the mix? Like if Im out with a group of people and one of them happens to be an accountant, and we spend 30 minutes going over the fine points of financial statements on my Friday night – I consider this valuable information, or is it just idle chit chat? If it’s 30 minutes out of 2 hours, does that change it? Is this a meeting or is it a drink?

Is it defined by the purpose? i.e if you INTEND to go get financial information, it’s a meeting, whereas if it happens by accident, it’s a drink.

Sometimes I think it’s funny that the things I get the MOST work out of or the best advice, are probably considered social situations, while the stuffy old ‘business’ events can often generate nothing, but probably look better in the accounts. Hmmm.