Hot and Spicys has a new home!

Hi!

I am very proud and excited to announce that Hot and Spicys now has its own domain and it is beautiful!

Please change any bookmarks you may have and, for everyone who has blogrolled me, please change the link to reflect the new site.

Bear with me in the beginning stages while I tweak the design and make the minor changes! The posts will go up as normal, but don’t be surprised if the look and feel changes slightly from day to day! A new post will go up later today, so make sure to bookmark it or subscribe!

So the home of Hot and Spicys is now www.hotandspicys. com

I look forward to welcoming you!

C

xxx

 

Treatment Phase 1

I have just returned home from the appointment with the Doc. The outlook is good, but I have come home without a prescription for required medication in my pocket, and about this, I feel a bit odd. The bottom line is that the Doc feels that he doesn’t know enough about the condition and the thousand medicines available to treat it. He says that some medicines, if prescribed incorrectly, can actually just make the problem worse. So the solution here is that I get my head shrunk a little and see what the specialists say. I feel this is the part where I need to have a minor breakdown. I understand that whole “you need to see a specialist” rationale. But lets just look at this. I am in a state of panic and anxiety brought on / exacerbated by, among other things, my disastrous financial situation. I am not on a medical aid / help scheme, and I am a single parent of two children, only one of whom has a father who understands he needs to contribute a meagre amount to his child’s expenses. And the cost for the first visit is crazy expensive, AND I was informed by the specialist that he runs a CASH ONLY practice. You got me. CASH. No credit cards, no cheques… Cash. Only. And he can’t see me until the 19th July.

Thats great and all, but here I sit in the mean time, trying very hard to hold the pieces of my life together with hands that are too covered in cooking oil to get a grip. I just can’t seem to get a handle on anything. My girls are driving me to drink. I HATE my job with such a passion. And I am broke. Soon to be bankrupted by my medical expenses. I think its ironic that the one thing that can help me is going to be the thing that cracks me up.

And just to top it all today, my nanny is sick. She has got a case of this flu virus that’s going around that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. So I am at home today with my kids and will be again tomorrow. BM is away and BL is back at the office. I am not sure how she feels about me working from home, but really what options do I have? And this whole situation has made me realise, once again, that I don’t want to work for a boss in an office anymore. I want to be able to be here for my kids. I want to be flexible and available to them at all times. I want to be dependant on me and financially free.

Last week, one of my colleagues finished her time at the company I work for and she is off on a freelancing career as a web developer. I have another two friends who work together at one of my previous employers who were “retrenched” today, and they are both going out there to freelance before they make big decision about their lives. I have a laptop, an internet connection and 10 hours in a day that I spend communting to work and back, and at the office.

If I didn’t have to go to the office, and if I could spend those 10hours making my own money and being here for my kids, what would I do? How would that money come…

I just realised that these are two seperate posts actually, aren’t they? But I clearly need to vent this stuff, so deal with it. Do you have any suggestions? Any ideas on what I can do?

Looking forward to hearing from you!

C
xxx

 

Back to the stabilising medication.

I made a monumental decision yesterday.

Its been such a long time since I have been flat with depression. I have been really good at keeping this thing in check. But yesterday I crashed. I think it was actually the explosion that’s been building since Friday that happened yesterday, but, whatever it was, it was devastating. I cried so many tears, and was totally unable to quell the depression thats been harbouring in my heart for a while. I was totally exhausted from another night of sleepless baby. I had huge rings under my eyes that even my industrial strength makeup wasn’t going to hide.

I am lonely, I am struggling to make ends meet in an economy that is not playing the game with anyone, I am battling to stay ahead of everything at work, and I am sick of the expense of living in the ass end of nowhere and having to drive 2000km’s every month to make the living I need to make. Its feels as though I have absolutely no way out of it, with DC semi-settling at her school in the valley where I live. I also have a nanny I can trust and she can’t travel out of the valley, so I am stuck.

I told my mother yesterday: “I am just dealing with a lot of hurt and the depression that was always going to happen post-NH. It just took longer than anyone expected to hit me. And now its hitting harder than I ever thought it would.”

After almost 3 years of dealing with my Manic Depressive Bipolar Disorder without any medication at all, I am going back to the Doc and getting back on the meds. I have realised that this is a disease, and there is no cure. I will sit with it for the rest of my life, and to self-manage it takes a HUGE amount of energy that I need to spend elsewhere. It’s not something I can sustain on a long term basis.

This decision has been so hard for me to make because I percieve going back on the meds as an indication that I am not in control, and that I can’t keep a handle on this monster that lives in me. But two truly beautiful friends, who I will treasure forever, made me realise yesterday that it’s ok. That I have more important things in my life that need me to be healthy and happy and that the only person who has the power to allow me to be happy is me. And that fighting this disease everday, without the help of the wonders of modern medicine, is crippling my ability to perform my duties as mother and daughter and employee and friend.

So I am going to take the advice of my friends, and put me first. Because if I am happy and stable, the rest will follow. My kids will be happier, my mom will be less inclined to freak out at me, my productivity at work will improve, and I will be able to be there for my friends. And God knows I owe them that. They have been there for me countless times, and its time for some Karmic payback.

Going back on the medication is a battle in itself. But this time I will get it right. Its a complicated and tedious process of weaning on, testing and tweaking. Making sure that the Doc and I find the right combination and balance of meds. The thing with this disease is it’s unique from one person to the next, so prescribing one treatment with a “blanket” philosophy doesn’t work. It takes a lot of involvement from the individual and the medical fraternity to get it just right. It’s a long, uphill journey but the rewards of living a semi-”normal” life far outweigh the struggles of getting there.

RA, thank you. Thank you for the practility and the kind words and for just being there. I know we haven’t known each other long, but I LOVE YOU! You’re one in a million!

NN, you’re such a special person. I am constantly blown away by the amazing strength and awesome heart you have hidden away in that tiny little body of yours! I am truly blesssed to have met you.

I spoke to a number of people yesterday about how I was feeling and these two, who have known me the shortest time, were able to help me come to the realisation that I need to see my Doc and get help. Maybe it was because they are new friends that they can look at it objectively… Maybe its because our bond is so special that they intuitively understand… I don’t know what it is, but I am eternally greatful to both of you. Thank you.

Right let me go and make the appointment to see the Doc and start this process.

C
xxx

 

My heart aches..

I watched the best movie EVER last night. I lay on my couch and I sobbed my heart out. PS. I love you has got to be my new all time favourite. Right up there with Love Actually. I have never been so moved by a story of love and fate and getting over it.

This most beautiful of stories tells us about a girl and guy who meet in Ireland, and fall in love. They get married and everyone says it won’t last and it was too soon and it happened too fast. They promise to always be together as their love is so strong. Then he dies. 3 weeks before her 30th birthday and she finds herself alone.

This movie reached right into my chest and held my heart in a precarious place, somewhere between breaking and being tenderly caressed for almost 2 hours. And it got me thinking about my own life and my own grief and all the things that are akin to death in my life and what I have and haven’t dealt with.

And it reminded me of how absolutely lonely I am. I long for a man whose arms I can dissappear into when I need to hide away from the world. A man who is capable of taking the reigns from my hands sometimes and whom I can trust with those reigns, that I can take a chance to just relax and be. I want a man whose (hairless) chest I can cuddle up to on a cold rainy winters night and who will let me fall asleep like that. I want a tall, dark-haired, blued eyed hunk who will be a man, and not allow me to walk all over him. See, I am a very stubborn and independant woman. I like to be in control of all aspects of my life, and what I want is a man who will gently challenge that instead of rolling over and playing dead, or agreeing, or doing what he thinks I want. Most of all though, I want a man who will accept my kids as part of the package and love them the way I do.

I learnt a valuable secret last  night. Guys take note: Don’t ask a woman what she wants, ‘cos (and this is the bit where I give it all away, but you can’t tell the girls I told you!) women don’t know what they want. But they will know it when they see it.

I am waiting with baited breathe for the moment that changes my life as I know it, and I am ready to welcome it with open arms. The thing with me is I am a HOPELESS romantic, and I am hoping he comes with an English or Irish or maybe even Scottisch accent, and I do believe in fairy tales and I do want my happily-ever-after, and I feel I have waited long enough and had enough pain in my life to deserve a good thing.

As many times as you will hear me say I am strong and indepedant and able to handle life on my own, I have always wanted a significant other to share the journey with. To be able to get home from work and have a hug… to be able to climb into bed with a warm and loving body at night… to be able to share a walk on the beach with on a Sunday morning… to read a book with, or ride a bike with… Am I asking too much?

As I am sitting here typing this, I can feel my heart aching in my chest for the kind of comfortable thing love brings, but I also yearn for the wild, spontaneous craziness that comes with the deal. The urge to jump in the car on a Friday after work and see where the road take us, armed with food, good wine, a tent and sleeping bags (and credit cards, just in case we don’t find a camping spot and end up in a 5 star hotel!).

I just want someone to share my life with, and some hot steamy sex as part of it wouldn’t be so bad either. I am in the heart of a 3 month drought in that department and the duracell’s just aren’t doing it anymore. I crave the warmth and hardness of a man’s body to get lost in, to smell and taste and touch… And to let him take over and have me…

I NEED A MAN!!!!!!!! Are there any takers out there? 1.4 billion people on the internet everyday… Please let one of them hold the kiss that changes my life as I know it… Come find me. Don’t make me get on a plane and come get you. Please.

 

Choices

ARGH!!!!!!!! I am in a slump. I can’t seem to shake this gloom that has settled over me over the last few weeks. I am unsure what exactly caused it, but I can tell you that it’s not pleasant.

When I was 19, a bunch of medical students, clad in white lab coats and diligently following their professor around a hospital, informed me that I had a mental disease called Manic Depression, with a dash of Bi-Polar added in for good measure. I have had 3 clinical breakdowns and have spent 5 days in the psychiatric ward of a big hospital in the city, since that dreaded day when those students laid out my fate for me. I have tried all sorts of treatments, from the traditional drugs like Efexor, Zanex, Prozac and a thousand others. When I was in hospital they even had me on Lithium. I have been to alternative healers who diagnosed me with a hormonal imbalance rather than a chemical one, and they too have tried a barrage of various treatments, from taking me off birth control to Reiki and acupuncture.

For the last two years I have been medication free. I have tried to manage this disease using the power of my mind because, through the haze in my head, I realise that I still have choices. I still choose to get out of bed in the morning, no matter how bad the illness gets. I hear stories of people with the same problem I have, who say they can’t get out of bed. I say “Crap!”. And I don’t mean to piss anyone off, or offend anyone. I am one of the sufferers. I have tried to slit my wrists MANY times. I understand the hurt and the suffering. But you still have a choice. Don’t be a victim to this disease. It is within you control to change it. I know we can never be healed of it, but we can be in control of it.

Having very passionately said that, I find myself in the grips of a depression that has not graced me with its presence in a while. It stems from the fact that the cost in living in this beautiful country that I call my home is spiralling out of control. The petrol price is killing me. My daily mileage from home to work and back, is around 80km’s, and its costing me around R70 a day to do the return trip. The prime lending rate has just gone up by 0.5%, taking it to 15.5%, and our electricity provider has just been granted an 13.3% increase in the price of electricity, meaning that since January of this year, we have had a total of 27% increase in the cost of this essential service. We will not mention how my grocery bill has hiked, or how much more I am paying for nappies and formula than I was forking out 6 months ago.

I now also have NH, having decided after 7 weeks away, that he would like to “be a part of HF’s life, and let her know she has a father.” WTF????????? Get a grip PLEASE! He has not made any kind of financial commitment or contribution to her, he still owes me thousands, and now he thinks its OK to waltz in and see her without making some kind of long term plan. Excuse me, but F&%# Off!

Then there’s the fact that the very thing that is helping me to keep my family afloat right now is my job, and that’s not fulfilling me or satisfying me in any way. I know that I want to write. I know that when I am sitting here, and I am writing the blog, I am truly happy. I want to inject my traffic stats with some steroids, and find a way to get out of this hell hole that is working for a boss and make it in this world for myself. I want the freedom of being able to fetch my kids from school, and to be there when the first first’s are happening. I want to be one of those mom’s that can be there for the Room Mom programme, to read to the kids for an hour in the mornings. I want to be one of those mom’s that is available to help with decor in the hall for school functions.

And all of this has led to a place where every day is crazy. Every day is a panic, and there is precious little time to just be. I feel as though I have truly become a Human Doing, and I hate it. I want to be secure in the knowledge that I am good enough. That I am capable to provide a life for my kids that they will look back on one day, and appreciate. That they will be able to say “Mom was really there for us.”

I have a big gap in my life right now and that gap is called satisfaction and happiness. I am not a greedy soul. I do not ask for vast quantities of these things. I just want a little dose of the things in life that make life worth all this, and at the moment I am not getting it. Was life designed to be like this? Is this living? I think not.

But I am here today, at my desk, in my gloomy office with rain pouring down outside, because I have made the choice to be here, rather than wallowing in my own self pity.

But my god, wallowing sounds like a better plan…

 

Life’s Passion…

I have had a wonderful weekend. I have busted my gut to get a campaign ready for launch today, as I promised BM I would do. I have baked the most delicious chocolate cake, I have burnt a batch of cupcakes, and iced these for DC’s 7th birthday party, which was yesterday. I have filled party bags, blown up 30 balloons and hung decorations. All for my house to be overrun by a herd of roudy 7 year olds, bolstered on by copious amounts of sugar and excitement. More sugar than excitement. I think.

The party was a Madhatter’s Tea Party, and the kids loved it. Thanks to MS, I got through it without having a breakdown and, other than being a little tired last night, I was good. At 12am this morning, I closed my laptop, confident that I would be good to launch my campaigns when BM had signed them off this morning, and life would be grand. HF had other plans for me though. She played a very interesting game last night, called Musical Beds. She started off in her own bed, then moved to mine. I woke up with a start at around 2am this morning to discover an obvious lack of baby in my bed. Upon further investigation, I found her in DC’s bed. I put her back in her own bed and I went back to my bed. It wasn’t long before she was back with me, then off again. Then DC was in my bed because HF was in her bed. Then we were all in my bed. Then DC went back to her bed. Only then was I able to get HF into a very light and disturbed slumber. She was restless and kept screaming out in her sleep and then mumbling my name and reaching out to feel me. And then, before I even had a chance to react, she rolled right out of the bed, and hit her head on the corner of the bedside table. I managed to console her and when I left for work this morning, feeling sleep deprived and, therefore, incredibly emotional, she was still sleeping. I phoned home at 10am, and she was still sleeping. I asked the nanny if she was in fact still breathing. The nanny laughed at me. I told her to wake HF and let me know if I needed to rush home.

A little while later I called again, and HF had eaten, and responded appropriately to all the nanny’s questions. I can rest a little easier now. I had visions of my little angel having concussion, or being in a coma, or some other major calamity. It was at this point, with the deep sigh of relief that came out of my body, that I realised that I never want to outlive my kids.

I know someone whose brother died last week as a result of injuries sustained from a car accident. I attended the funeral last week Friday, and the pain his mother was feeling was tangible for me. I was really caught up in her emotion. And this morning brought that home for me. I didn’t realise that I was holding my breathe for HF to wake up and be ok until she woke up and was ok.

My heart truly walks around in two parts outside my body. Half of it lives in DC, and the other half in HF. without them I am afraid that I would not have enough life force left in me to put one foot in front of the other and carry on. They are my reason for being. The only reason I get up in the mornings and come to work to do a job I don’t particularly enjoy. A job that means I miss out on 10 precious hours with them every day, and can’t be there for them should they need me. A job where BM can’t even make sure that he is here to sign off the campaigns I worked hard on all weekend (sacrificing time with my kids) so that I can get them live, and get the hard-earned pat on the back I deserve.

Why do I do this? Why don’t I take my passion for writing and social responsibility and do something meaningful with my life? Something that gives me time to savour and enjoy the precious little time I have with my girls…

On that note, it’s back to the grindstone for me. And BM is still not in.

C
x

 

A special kind of friendship

I have been procrastinating about writing this post since I started this blog. Partly because I have been trying to figure out exactly how it is I feel and how to put that into words, but mostly because writing it and publishing it means having to acknowledge it and I am not sure that I want to.

There is a person in my life who completes me. We met about 3 or 4 years ago on one of the most beautiful beaches in Cape Town, surrounded by 100’s of people who share our passion to play with fire. So there we were, drawn together by some kind of strange pull. I was with NH at the time and so I never entertained the thought of anything more than a friendship, but I couldn’t deny that this man was meant to be a part of my life somehow. Now, I have to just say, that I have NEVER developed a friendship with anyone that I have met in some random place. All my friends have come into my life through friends or school or work or college. So this in itself indicates some kind of special link here.

Slowly this friendship grew into something so special and dear to me that I cannot imagine my life without him in it. I have even on occasion been told he is my soul-mate and that we will be part of each others lives until we are old and grey. We complete each others sentences, and we have this weird affliction we like to call our “spider-senses”. I shall call him SpideyDude in this blog for that very reason. We don’t speak to each other for months on end and then, out of the blue, he will call me to ask what’s wrong… Normally these calls coincide with some or other major drama in my life, or even when I am feeling a little blue. We have the kind of compatibility with each other that results in being able to just be ourselves around each other and to let it all hang out, figuratively speaking. We have seen each other at our respective bests, and worsts, and we still love each other. He takes any new man in my life aside, and tells him in no uncertain terms, that he is my friend and he isn’t going anywhere. “Like it, or leave” is his attitude! I am a very lucky girl to be able to have this kind of friendship with a man, and know that there are no expectations or requirements. As long as I am me, he loves and cares for me.

So. when recently, I “noticed” him as a physical being for the first time, I was shocked. I started to think that there could be something more, and my friends noticed the physical tension between us too. I got into a flat panic. What was happening? What was going on here? What had changed? Had anything changed? Did he feel it to? What was I going to do? I couldn’t talk to him about it because I was terrified that even uttering the words would result in some cataclysmic end to our friendship and I didn’t want that.

Was I prepared to make the move and take that monumental gamble on the best friendship I have ever had? The answer came back as a resounding “No”. But the feelings kept getting stronger and I was really confused. Until last Saturday and our outrageous evening at Cape To Cuba. Even though my body language was very positive and suggestive, he went to his own home on his own that night. I was shattered. How is it possible that I could be that unattractive?

But it wasn’t that at all. Funny how girls always jump to that conclusion first. It’s got to be me… What’s wrong with me? When all along what it was was that he cares too much for me and for our friendship to gamble on it. It was that he got his fingers very badly burnt once, and he is still hurting from it. I understand that, and I respect that. And I respect him and love him to the ends of the earth, and wouldn’t change that for all the tea in China.

I feel like the weight that I have been carrying for the past 4 weeks is gone. I am relieved that this has played itself out like it has, and that I am still blessed with the best friend a girl could ask for, EVER!

SpideyDude, I love you. Thank you for loving me.

CM

xxx

 

My Sex and the City Friends

Hello. I sincerely hope your weekend is treating you better than mine is treating me. I have been promising to introduce to some of the mad and very special people I call my friends, and today is your lucky day. We spent a very interesting evening together last night and I thought it would be the perfect platform to let you take a peek at what my friends are like.

MS and UP have their birthdays 2 weeks apart, so it was decided that on the 7th June we would all go to a rather lush restaurant called Cape To Cuba. Its a great little place where everything you see is for sale and the food is great and the drinks are better. The company was pretty good too! Some of the people in our gathering last night included ITG, who is MS’s colleague, SD who is the best guy friend a girl could wish for, LF who is our lawyer friend (’cos you always have to have one of those!) and UP who is a prude of note but so very very very funny!

MS and I go way back. We met at college, both studying a course in PC Engineering. We were top students in our classes and got away with pretty much everything. We’re also both very tough, hard arsed women and we get what we want when we want it. Where I bring the emotional, think with your heart side to our friendship, MS brings the cold hard logic. We have always said that this is what makes our friendship work. We compliment each other so well. And then of course there’s the fact that when one of us gets a hair-brained idea and can’t see the wood for the trees, the other one is usually standing beside her friend, saying “This is a BAD idea and here’s why.” Our friendship is full of honesty and we’re not afraid to tell each other exactly what we think. We also not afraid to say “I told you so” when a brilliant plan fails colossally. Many of the friends we have have never seen the two of us in action when we’re out… And so last night I think we may have intimidated a lot of people. We were both on top form and the comments coming out of our mouths rendered many people speechless on numerous occasions.

There was the shooter line-up, starring MS and me (this is following on a tradition from college where every round of drinks was accompanied by 5 shooters all containing tequila with the last one being a Flaming Lamborghini). Last night we decided to tone it down a bit, as we’re older now and probably notable to handle the college-style abuse to our livers and other vital organs anymore, so we started with a Blowjob, then a B52, a Suitcase, a Springbok and ending with a tequila, straight. Every single person around that table thought that that was going to be the end of us for the evening and that either we would be sick, or we were simply going to pass out. Neither of the above happened. In fact all the alcohol successfully managed to do was sharpen our tongues a little more, and numb our “do I care” meters a little further.

Then of course there was my challenge for the evening. MS has been talking about the hats that the waiters at CTC wear and she told me she wanted someone around the table to buy her a hat for her birthday. In all my confidence I told her not to worry. That I would unashamedly flirt my way into the waiter taking his hat off for her. And I succeeded! By the end of the evening MS was going home with a hand crafted Cuban hat, GRATIS!

Then there was the independent opinion poll that I ran with the male members of our party in a bid to establish what the honest opinion is amongst men when it comes to pubic hair on a woman. The boys unanimously voted for the clean shaven woman. This of course led to much heated debate between the girls and the guys about why women should have to go through all the pain and suffering of regular Brazilian waxes when guys don’t feel that they need to get rid of their fluff. The grand conclusion to this one was that if any of them ever wanted oral sex again, they need to clean up!

This wonderful conversation led into the “To Spit or Swallow” debate, and again much heat was being distributed around the table (but that may have been the shooters! ) I won’t go into this one too much, other than LH and I agreeing, and informing the other ladies of our party that if you aim his penis at the top of your mouth, and knock it back like we had knocked down the shots, you aren’t going to taste anything and you’re going to have a happy man. The other girls weren’t convinced but the guys were speechless. They didn’t know how to handle this little titbit of information. Should they be clambering over themselves for our attention, or should they just run away?

Many fantastic debates and conversations were had last night, and we certainly enjoyed the experience! Pity though that we came home sans any specimens of the male species to practice some of the many conversation points on, but hey, life goes on. I realised when we got home that I had come home sans cellphone too, and then the cold realisation hit me that someone had removed my phone from the table while I was settling our bill. Great. Not only were there still people sitting at our table, but we were the only people left in the restaurant aside from 2 or 3 waiters.

I am so furious. That such a wonderful evening could be overshadowed so sadly by an incident such as this. And its not like I was being particularly careless with my stuff either. MS left her R3000 Chanel handbag in plain site of everyone and she still has all her belongings. I think it is truly reflective of the society you live in when you dine out with a group of friends at a pricey establishment (our bill came to R2740.45 – That works out to a price per head of around R450), and still you are in a situation where your personal items can disappear so quickly. And like I said the restaurant wasn’t busy. We were the only people left when the incident happened, and there were still members of our party sitting at the table. My phone was lifted right under their noses.

I only realised what had happened when we got home and then it was too late. I am going to end this report of my evening here, and am going to continue with another very interesting aspect of the evening and give you more on my friendship with SD later, as it lends another aspect to the evening that is pivotal to my story. Till later…

TBC…

 

Feedback…

I am going to stray away from the pattern I have been following. But just for today. I have to vent about the absolute disaster that was the presentation of my marketing strategy today.

Never in my entire life have two people managed to make me feel so stupid. I have been here for two months and during that time I have gone back into the PPC ccampaigns that have been run by this company. I have looked at the click to enquiry ratio, I have analysed the enquiry to sale ratios, I have calculated the ROI on thousands of campaigns and adgroups, I have identified successful and unsuccessful keywords, and I have built proposals with budget indicators, and estimated ROI and projected sales attached. I have done extensive research into our competitors and what their daily spends are on PPC, how many clicks they get etc. I have looked at our reach vs their’s on alexa.com. I have laboured over excel spreadsheets for 1000’s of hours. I have even gone as far as to include elements that are not part of my brief, such as Social Media Marketing and the 4 R’s of marketing (evolved from the 4 P’s of marketing (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) it is basically Recognise (or Reveal), Respect, Reward, and Retain) and all that jazz.

So I walk in to the meeting room, after fighting with the binding machine for almost half an hour, with three beautiful presentations. I struggle a bit with the projector and my laptop’s internet connection, but eventually I get it sorted… And then I wait. And wait. And wait.

Eventually, I get up and I have to go and find BL and BM and remind them (because their Outlook Calendars have clearly failed to do so) that we have a meeting now. “Oh!” is one response. “Where are we doing this?” is the other. This is not boding well for me.

So with everyone herded in, I start my presentation. I swear, I was about 30 seconds into it when BM starts lambasting me. Telling me quite clearly I have missed the mark with my strategy, and BL is asking if I even bothered to speak to anybody in the company about anything. She doesn’t feel that I have a good grasp of what this company is about. Apparently, the historical data in their DB’s is wrong. Some of it only started tracking at a later stage, and some of it is optional for the customer to complete, so all my stats are skewed, hence my ROI figures are out, leading to my projections being wrong, and basically all my campaign proposals and demographic data being completely wrong.

And then, as if the verbal crushing and the emotional shattering weren’t bad enough (I was sitting there listening to these two people killing my entire proposal OK. Cut me some slack. It was emotional), they both left when I was half way through my presentation. Then BM got a phone call and said he had to leave and he was gone.. And BL had another meeting. HOW RUDE!!!!!!!! I hadn’t even got to the affiliate marketing plans, or my input on Social Media. AND THEY WERE LATE!

And I was being told it was back to the drawing board for me. That’s great, except that this strategy was part of my first set of 60 day objectives for this company and I haven’t met them, which is NOT good.

All I can say is thank God it is Friday and that I have the whole weekend to try and put something together to redeem myself. Thank you for reading this far, and even if you didn’t, at least I have ranted and raved and got it off my chest. Good weekend all.

C

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New Beginnings contd…

There are a number of categories of major emotional upsets in life. They include the end of a relationship, moving house and changing jobs. People in the know say that you should never do more than one of these at the same time. Well I disagree. If you do two or more of these emotionally upsetting things at the same time, somewhere through it all it becomes difficult to feel the feelings associated to each major event and it just becomes a blur… so you get superstressed and then its over and a new life has begun. Why prolong the agony? Just get it done…

Right in the middle my life being turned upside down by NH and PA moving out, and DC and HF and I trying to find our new rhythm, I started a new job. Just to show you that I am a person who in fact practices what I preach, NH’s decision to move out happened a mere 3 days before I started my hot new job with a GREAT travel company, specialising in inbound travel to Africa. Its a high pressure job, and I have been promised a promotion to Online Marketing Manager at the end of November this year if my performance is up to scratch.

I have been in online marketing for 4 years and it is my passion, in theory. That’s because in theory it works wonderfully, when in fact, in practice it’s all a big guessing game. A gamble through and through. But I love it. I love the pressure and as much as I complain, it’s what drives me daily.

The stresses come in, obviously, in fitting my killer job in with being a single mom and having tight schedules with both kids. And, of course, starting this job with so much emotional stuff going at home and having to make a good impression in my first days here. Not easy, but because I am the kind of person who CANNOT be seen to be failing at anything, I threw myself at the challenge.

Tomorrow, I am presenting my Marketing Strategy and Business Needs Analysis to the Board, and I am having a breakdown. I am nowhere near being ready for this. I probably should not be sitting here blogging about what I haven’t done. I should probably be doing it, but I need to just take a little break from the major drain on my brain power right now.

I digress. I work with an amazing bunch of people who have managed to drag it out of me, and to open up and confide in them about the situation at home. They have covered for me and helped to get through some of more rough patches, and made sure that I always come out shining, and I am sure tomorrow will be more of the same. They will make tea, we will grab a ciggie and then I will be in there doing the best I can and delivering a marketing strategy that will blow the Board away. At least, thats what I am hoping for.

So in a nutshell, thats my job… Let me recap here so that I can make sure that I have covered all the “boxes” of my life before we through the boxes away and I let you in on how all the segments of my life come together to form a semi-perfect whole. You have looked into my relationship with NH (or the very tip of that iceberg, at least), my kids, and my job… Soon I will write about the beautiful people I call my friends, and that will be the end of chapter one.

I truly hope you are enjoying the experience so far!

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