Grr! I am starting to get really fed up with personal maintenance.

 There was a time when all a woman had to do to get ready in the morning was have a wash and pop on a bonnet. These days, the time required for personal maintenance could qualify as a full time job. It’s impossible to keep up with the list of demands, and I for one, am about to revolt.

 I accept that one’s crowning glory requires considerable time and care, what with all the cutting, colouring, blow-drying and styling. However, the irony is that the look of the moment is ‘natural’, so women are lining up for a treatment known as ‘balayage’. It might sound fancy, but it’s essentially paying a hairdresser $300 to give you dark roots – something you’ve spent thousands of dollars over the years trying to avoid.

 Then there are those pesky fingernails that only give you a few good days out of a manicure. That perfectly buffed-and-polished look requires a fortnightly commitment to the nail technician’s chair.

 Spray-tan devotees enjoy a week of flawless, golden glow before they need to scrub off the streaky brown stains and book another application. And I haven’t even touched on the subject of body hair yet – all I’ll say about that is, let’s hope we never enter an ice age, ladies, because we won’t have any insulation…

 You’d think personal grooming would have been simplified for modern women whose lives are busier than ever. Instead, we put more pressure on ourselves to be perfectly turned out. I was falling so far behind with my personal maintenance recently, I snapped. With split ends and no time to visit the hairdresser, I had what can only be described as a hair breakdown. I fixed it up nicely for a party with way too much gel, and, when I got home that night I decided not to wash it and went straight to bed. The dishevelled do stayed the way it was for three days simply because I didn’t have the energy to deal with it.

 Although this is behaviour not seen since pioneer women disembarked the First Fleet in Botany Bay, it was strangely liberating (albeit itchy). Lacquered with so much hairspray it was more a helmet than a hairdo. I didn’t have to give it a thought for ages. It was only when I started to resemble a bird’s nest that I finally released my locks from their lacquered strangle-hold.

 I had so much more time to do other things during the whole hairdo experience, I’m now making a determined effort to decrease my maintenance in all areas to free up some ‘me time’. I have to say though; it’s not easy for a woman who’s been a slave to these rituals. Even as I write this, my attention is drawn to a wayward cuticle…It’s taking all my willpower to leave it alone.

HOT CHOCOLATE FOR THE SOUL.

 I am not sure who wrote this, so I have no-one to credit. It was sent to me this morning and just spoke to my heart. It is a delicious metaphor and I wanted to share it with you and wish you a lovely weekend with lots of sweet, warm hot chocolate…

 A group of graduates, well established in their careers, were talking at a reunion and decided to go visit their old university professor, now retired. During their visit, the conversation turned to complaints about stress in their work and lives. Offering his guests hot chocolate, the professor went into the kitchen and returned with a large pot of hot chocolate and an assortment of cups - porcelain, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to the hot chocolate.

 When they all had a cup of hot chocolate in hand, the professor said: “Notice that all the nice looking; expensive cups were taken, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. The cup that you’re drinking from adds nothing to the quality of the hot chocolate. In most cases it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink. What all of you really wanted was hot chocolate, not the cup; but you consciously went for the best cups…And then you began eyeing each other’s cups.

 Now consider this: Life is the hot chocolate; your job, money and position in society are the cups.  They are just tools to hold and contain life. The cup you have does not define, nor change the quality of life you have.  Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the hot chocolate God has provided us. God makes the hot chocolate, man chooses the cups. The happiest people don’t have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything that they have. Live simply. Love generously. Care deeply. Speak kindly. And enjoy your hot chocolate.

The 80’s ripped us teenagers off!

 The longer I live, the more convinced I become that my generation got severely ripped off as teenagers growing up in the mid to late'80s. Compared with the '60s and '70s with their almost compulsory drug use and free love, or the late '90s and '00s where girls dressed like porn stars and oral sex was "the new pashing" - the '80s was a friggin' disaster!   "Girls wore baggy sweaters to cover their rear ends, drugs were evil and everyone was terrified of AIDS," US sports columnist Bill Simmons writes. A girl's idea of sexy was a Billy Idol haircut, cage-fighter fingerless gloves, a pair of those poop-catcher harem pants, grandpa's fisherman jumper and Doc Martens that took longer to unlace than some relationships lasted.
  Blokes got around with the famous "Flock of Seagulls" haircut, eyeliner, winklepickers and cheese-cloth singlets. Androgyny reigned - and ain't that a recipe for good times, eh - when you can't tell the boys and girls apart? Was it any wonder? Half our rock stars were gay men, singing about gay sex, but we didn't know it.
  When George Michael enthused about making it big and Depeche Mode sang Just Can't Get Enough, well, we should have known better. We did with Boy George, but it didn't help our confusion. I asked another female veteran of the '80s what was going on with the shoulder pads and Rupert Bear tartan jodhpurs so favoured by her peers and she described them as "man repellers". "If guys were cool enough to get it, then they were in," she said. Not that "in" counted for much in the first paranoid years of the AIDS "epidemic".
  Simon Reynolds and his Grim Reaper ad might have woken us up to the spread of the disease but it pretty much ruined the rooting years of millions of Aussie teens. Seriously, this was a time when Michael Jackson was a sex symbol, so you can imagine how much chance a bloke had for intimacy prancing around in white socks and kung Fu shoes.
  Gen Y should get on their knees and thank the whimsies of culture that they've come of age in an era in which women consider see-through leggings as pants and sex is often a precursor to an introduction. Still, there were a few saving graces being a teen in the '80s.
  There was no photo ID - you could get into a bar at 15 with a photocopy of your best friend's cousin's mate's birth certificate. Responsible service of alcohol meant that when a 16-year-old schoolboy collapsed on the dance floor after nine tequila laybacks, the bartenders would high five each other.
  Midnight Oil cranked out albums such as Bird Noises, Place Without a Postcard and 10 to 1, one-day cricket was chock full of Aussies you actually liked and Greg Evans's rise to fame gave short men hope all over the country. Still, I'll always be filthy about those baggy jumpers.

What did you love and hate about the 80s?

I hate going shopping for a bra!

 Don’t know about you, but I believe with my whole heart and soul that the most horrid thing in the world to do is go bra shopping. I’d rather have my eyelashes pulled out one lash at a time by a toothless sheep herder who hasn’t had a bath EVER. In fact I think I hate bra shopping more than men hate being asked to pop down to the shops to pick up the wife’s tampons.   So it was no surprise to me to find out that 70% of women are wearing the wrong sized bra, which can be a pain in the neck, back and shoulders, can cause shortness of breath and highlight another one of my pet hates: BACK FAT!
  Most women share this hatred with me, and it starts from the good old training bra. How hideous was it going to the bra section with your mum proudly telling all and sundry that like a flower you were budding, and having your new little twin peaks poked and prodded by some old duck with minty breath. Then the boys at school stop playing footy at lunch and make a sport of flicking your bra straps or just plain staring at them during maths class.
  I’m in the habit of finding a style I like and buying one in every colour so I don’t have to think about it until the bras develop Baggy Back, which is a bra term for loose at the back which causes a see-saw affect at the front. Noice. Apparently there are quite a few terms for different bras:
The Catholic bra: one that supports the masses (mine).
The Salvation Army bra: lifts the fallen.
The Baptist bra: makes mountains out of molehills.
  One helpful website suggested that when buying a bra, one should compare it to buying a pair of shoes. Excuse me? Buying shoes is a joy, a delight, in fact when I get to heaven I’ll be surrounded by shoes. Being in a fluoro-lit change room, trying to find a bra that doesn’t squeeze my back fat, feels more like hell.
  Buying a bra is like entering a battlefield. Wrong cup size, your boobs bulge over or worse, don’t fill. Wrong chest size and, yep, back fat or zero support which equals black eyes when you go for a run. Wrong cut and you can’t wear certain clothes. Under wire supposedly causes cancer, yet no under wire and you sag (ewww). Wrong material and you itch. Frilly and pretty or plain and versatile. Seamless or stitch. Lift or separate. Padded (misleading) or natural (depressing).
  Are you starting to feel sorry for us yet boys? If only we needed to wear bras just to impress men. Although they appreciate them, what boy leaves a bra on long enough to realise it took two miserable hours to select. They all exclaim they look lovely, but a whole lot better on their floor.
  Sadly we need to wear them to maintain perkiness. In fact I once read that we should wear a bra to bed if we wanted the girls to be higher than our knees at 60. Agh the horror.  And guys, so sorry for the bra rant, next time I’ll give you tips on how to un-clip a bra with one hand whilst pissed and in the dark.