I’m currently writing this on my couch, on my iPad, typing away on my cool foldable keyboard. With a glass of wine within reach too, of course.
(Update: When I tried posting this it wouldn’t upload the images, so I’m now posting this from my laptop on Saturday morning. Kinda spoils my section later about enjoying posting from the iPad – not if it doesn’t work!)
Clothes decluttering
Inspired by my efforts to develop a capsule wardrobe, but mostly inspired by Nicole’s fashionable blog post, I decluttered my t-shirt drawer this morning.
Since my weight loss, I’ve been slowly getting better at donating the clothes I don’t fit anymore. But my tees have been a different story. I love an oversized shirt, or comfy worn out singlets that I wear under hoodies. My drawer was overflowing, which was silly, since I really only had the same shirts on rotation.
I love Nicole’s style – it’s simple, comfortable, but stylish. It’s basically what I’m trying to get towards. So after reading that post this morning, I put my phone down and attacked the drawer. I tried on all my shirts, and after a mini fashion show, attempted to be objective on what was flattering, and what wasn’t.
End result – a very big gap in my drawer. I still need to work on that “get a fashion sense” thing though.
Also, I giggled when I saw that Nicole and I both seemingly use the Kon Mari folding method, though mine certainly aren’t very tidy! I love displaying my shirts this way so it’s super easy to see them all in one hit.
Board game 52 – tick!
This week I caught up with some very good friends of mine for an online meet up, and to play a board game!
We all used to live on the coast, but a few years back Bel moved to the other side of Australia. Thanks to the internet we still get together regularly with video calls.
When I reached out to ask if they were keen for a board game night, it was a resounding yes. And I’m so grateful that even how busy our schedules may get, I love that we keep making time for each other and to stay friends all these many years later.
The only thing I regret is that I didn’t get a photo!
We played Code Names – a game I’ve been wanting to play for so long. I had to watch a YouTube video first to understand how to play, and then talked them through it, but after a couple of games we started to get the hang of it. And it’s a lot of fun! Short version: You say a word to try and get your team to guess which cards are your team cards, without accidentally guessing the other team cards, or worst, the assassin (aka your team loses).
To play online, one person goes to codenames.game and creates the game link. Everyone else joins the link from their devices, and play together. That’s it!
So much fun.
And because I forgot to take a photo, please enjoy this ninja star that my son made.
Dip Nail Reorg
Also on the cleaning front this week, I had to reorganise my dip nails. Glamrdip had a huge birthday sale, and opened the vault to colours that had sold out and not been brought back.
I have a temperature changing dip, that turns from a dark blue to green depending on whether your hands are warm or cold. And truly, it was a huge regret that I didn’t get the rest of the colours in the set at the time. Needless to say, when they brought that range back, I bought the rest of them. Plus some other colours too, because um… for science.
They arrived this week, and it made me realise that my colours no longer fit in the box I had. I bought some new containers, and well, they didn’t fit in there either. So now there’s some in the new containers, some in the old box, and a new addition to my shopping list to buy more.
I kinda like the idea of having a container for the blues, another for the greens, the purples, the pinks etc. I think it will look rather nice on the shelves too, especially since I use the same containers for my pen collections.
Tomorrow morning I’ll be doing my nails with one of the new colours, and I’m not sure which one yet. Decisions, decisions!
Getting all AI up in here
This week I have been nerding out a little bit.
Since I transitioned over to my new blog, I’ve been dragging the chain with getting a lot of stuff set up behind the scenes. Nothing sexy, just mainly around image optimisation, SEO stuff etc.
Well, with all the AI stuff I’ve been doing for work, I stumbled upon an article that inspired a chain of thoughts. Next minute, I had connected Claude with my blog, and was playing around to see what it could do.
I’ll never use AI to write my posts for me. I enjoy the process of writing, it’s a creative outlet for me and I love the brain dumps. But when I started looking at why it was taking so long to post, I found the friction was proof-reading my own work. I’d either give up and post it with loads of errors (then overthink it and re-read it 5-6 times finding more errors each time), or walk away and take a while to come back and finish it off. And sometimes so much time would pass that it just didn’t make sense to post it, and it was ditched altogether.
Being able to just brain dump my thoughts onto a page, then running AI over it for spelling and grammar checks, not to mention poor writing, is a godsend. It’s helped me to speed up the process a lot, so I can get back to the bits I love. Not to mention the fact that I can now run a full SEO audit, optimise images, and more, right from Claude – that’s a bit cool.
I haven’t actually explored using AI much for everyday life yet. The most recent was using it to figure out my fantasy World Cup team (and ended up winning that comp), and occasionally just a bit of travel brainstorming.
So to summarise, this ramble came straight from my brain, not from AI, and it can do cool things.
Blogging on my iPad
Well, I suppose my final thing is that I’ve learned from writing this post on my iPad that I don’t hate this method. That’s helpful!
Later this year we’ll be taking a pretty big family holiday, and I really want to capture it on my blog. I love re-reading some of my own holiday stories sometimes, and just re-living the moments.
The problem comes with the logistics of making it work.
- Carving out time each day to write the post.
- How and which device I use to post.
- I hate using an onscreen keyboard to write. I’m also better at writing than I am speaking, so trying voice to text would be um, interesting.
- How do I optimise the images so that I’m not sharing multiple 4-5 MB images on a single post, killing my blog disk space and slowing it right down for the readers.
I love holidays, and I love writing about holidays, but I’m very slow at writing recaps. Take my American trip for example. At my current rate of writing one post a week (roughly), it’s going to take me 1.5 months to finish the whole thing. By that time I’ll have forgotten most of the little moments that made the trip.
*Aerosmith voice – I don’t wanna miss a thing.
I have absolutely loved reading Elisabeth‘s and Kae‘s holiday recaps. They’re so detailed, and so enjoyable to read.
So…my plan is to spend the time upfront to find a process that works, and will make it fun and easy. There’s going to be so many incredible moments to share, I don’t want to lose that.
If anyone has some tips on how to blog while on holidays, I’d love to hear them! Or if you’ve started to dabble in using AI for everyday life?
