The weekend isn't really a weekend when you're not working is it? I am surprised that it came around so quickly, but then I have been pretty busy - just not 'physically' busy. It's been mainly head work. I'm pleased to say though that I have three clients to see tonight!

They booked to see me in January but it was during all the bad weather we had here and I was stuck in Gran Canaria and couldn't fly back in time - remember? Anyway, I've got one reflexology session, then one Indian Head Massage and finally Hopi Ear Candles. I will be hoping that they all rush home and tell all their friends as I need to get going with the therapies.

What have you got planned for this weekend?

I'm still catching up with the new season of Lost - in fact I think I have ended up seeing one more episode than has been shown yet in the UK. I am very into it - NO SPOILERS PLEASE!!!  

Apart from that I am going to an event organised by Patrick on Sunday - I will try and find a link to it - Here you go! He has selected some speeches - some famous some perhaps notorious - the idea behind it being is it the speech or the speaker that makes a speech powerful? So the next few Sundays are taken up partly by that. I'm flying  my mom over to see the Hitler speeches on Mother's Day!

Then on Monday we are going to the eagerly awaited 'Do You Remember The First Time' I'm mainly going to this gig to see Duke Special perform again but I was very happy to see that The Divine Comedy are there too. It will be a good night I think and an excellent introduction to the local live music scene over here.

Not sure about Saturday - should I go to this or stop in and watch TV... maybe Lost?!

Whatever you do, I hope it is fun.

I have got a lot on at the moment and it's great! I have got the website up and running and it has been 'found' by google already which is great. I need to 'tweak' it a bit more so it will come up in searches for, say: "reflexology+belfast" rather than just a search on the name of the website itself. I even got a call yesterday from a lady who had seen the website and is interested in having a treatment.

I have my insurance sorted out and my certificates in their frames and all I need now is to get somewhere to hang them. Sadly the house isn't big enough for me to treat strangers from home so I will need to hire room space in Belfast - this will cut into the profit margin of course but can't be helped until we think about moving to a larger house maybe near the end of the year.

I have found one place already and they are friendly enough. It is a shop selling crystals etc and they have rooms to rent above so it will probably be suitable but I want to keep looking around and perhaps have a few places I can go to in case this one place should be full. I have thought about approaching the local gyms and salons to see if they have room for me - it may mean that I have access to their clients as well.

So busy busy busy!

I have a few treatments left to do before I finish the Hopi Ear Candle course but I am confident in their use by now and all I have to do is get the treatments written up and sent to my trainer and that's that. I am not planning on doing another 'big' therapy course this year but as I have probably already said I think I need to give learning to drive a try. I do believe that there are people in this world who shouldn't drive (some do but really shouldn't!) and I fear that I may be one of those people. The problem is though that doing this kind of work I really could do with being mobile - being able to work from the clients house would save me a lot of money and would open up a new market as there are bound to be people who would rather have a treatment in the comfort of their own home.

I will give learning the theory for the theory test a try and then see how I get on. If I cannot get through that part of the test then there is no point committing to hideously expensive driving lessons. Oh how I wish I had learned when I was younger!

Oh! Can you help? I'm going to change the name of the blog soon - any suggestions??!

I've been kept pretty busy this week yet can't think of much to tell that justifies another weeklong silence!

I have reserved my space in cyberspace for the website for my new business and have started designing the website; it's been quite a while since I have done anything like this. I used to have a pretty good website that had many thousands of hits but once I started blogging here I left it to drift off until the day Yahoo! pulled the plug and I lost everything. Starting another one and wanting to get it right has been exhausting - pathetic yes - but true nonetheless.   I will give the address here and on Facebook once it is up and running.

We had a visitor from Birmingham come to stay for the weekend and it was lovely to have him to stay He's been a friend since we shared a flat in Prague the first year we were both there and unlike most of the people I met in my Prague years he has stayed close. It was a pretty relaxed weekend, the weather wasn't too bad and so we took a trip into the mountains around Belfast and even got to sit outside a pub in Belfast city centre on Saturday late afternoon as it was just warm enough to justify it... well, for the first 15 minutes at least! Saturday night I invited some friends over for dinner and I made a chicken Madras, a fish green curry, Sag Aloo, rice and naan bread for us to eat.

This was what I was looking forward to doing again - cooking for people and sitting talking late into the night. It really was lovely to surrounded by interesting, intelligent people after having spent too long in my old house alone. It was my choice to be alone then I guess - I could have invited the handful of friends I had in the last two years of life in Birmingham but I just didn't. Aaaaaaaaaanyway! I don't see that happening again; Patrick and I have some lovely friends now and of course that circle will grow if ever I get myself back to work.

I have a few applications in the pipeline. Most of the jobs will be part time, which gives me a chance to start building up my business and seeing how viable a proposal it really is before I dive in. Fingers crossed that one of those applications will bear fruit soonish.

Hooray! I just got the new album by Anthony and the Johnsons - this is one of the tracks with an interesting take on epilepsy. I'm also thrilled to be seeing them perform in Belfast in June. If you haven't heard much of his stuff I urge you to seek him out on Youtube he has a rather singular voice.

When I heard that bad weather was coming to the UK I allowed myself to feel a little smug at choosing the same week to head off to gran Canaria for another little bit of sunshine with my friend John who didn't make it out with us in December. I knew I shouldn't have felt smug, I knew I'd have to pay - karma will out!

So I should have gotten the Aer Lingus flight to Dublin airport then a bus to Belfast on Thursday night /Friday morning but when I got to the airport it was with the knowledge that the flight had been cancelled! I went up their anyway as I thought it best to speak to the AL representative on the ground. When I got their I joined many other confused and frustrated people amazed that their was not a single member of AL staff there. Some poor Canarian people in the information office were being subjected to the ire or the mob (I stepped out of THAT group straight away). There was nothing to be done we all had to phone the reservations department and re-book and it could be a week before we leave! There was no financial assistance available, if you couldn't afford a hotel you were in trouble and very much on your own. Luckily for me the villa i was staying in for the week was free and so I headed back and Patrick got onto the phone in Belfast and sorted me a return flight next Tuesday.

It's a funny thing. I have lived on my own, on and off, for most of my adult life but I know one thing about myself and that is that I cannot bear being on my own on holiday! John had left to fly home via London the night before all this and so this was me stuck in paradise. I managed 18 hours before I cracked and got the credit card out and found a route back to the icy 'hell' that is the UK & Ireland and I leave tomorrow morning to fly first to Tenerife and then onwards to Dublin... assuming that the flight is still going. I called AL up and told them I wanted a refund, which I got but not a word of regret for the inconvenience. To be fair it wasn't their fault I guess as, after all we had had over eight, count them, eight INCHES of snow on the run ways!

Still, if I can get home tomorrow no doubt I will be moaning about the cold and the ice and the snow and wishing I was back here.  Typical huh?!

I should say by the way, that John and I had a lovely holiday. decent warm weather and lots of laughs. John and I often argue but he is a friend that I have known for many years now and when we get on along well it is always a delight to be around him. I should say that most of the time we are not arguing and it is a delight!

We didn't do a lot, just took long walks had lots of grilled fish, 'papas arugadas' and salad and ruined it all by staying out late and drinking litres of vodka and diet coke in the many, many gay bars in Playa Del Ingles! That's enough for one year though - time to go home, dry out and wrap up and apply myself to the task of finding paid work and developing the business. Life is good even if sometimes it snows!

Hope every one in the UK is ok and wrapped up warm?

I am going back to Gran Canaria for another week of sunshine tomorrow afternoon... 'cos I can!

There is always a point in some dinner party or another when someone challenges another to name five famous Belgians. I have always been able to name enough to satisfy the challenge; Hervé (Georges Remi) author of the Tintin books, Rene Magritte, Georges Simenon (author of Maigret crime novels), Jacques Brel, Plastique Bertrand (remember the song Ça Plane Pour Moi'???) and let's not forget Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston aka Audrey Hepburn.

This morning I have another one to add to the list - Sister Adel aka Soeur Sourire aka The Singing Nun aka Jeanne Deckers. I got in from walking Fintan and put the TV on to watch the news with my breakfast but TCM was on from last night and the film The Singing Nun starring Debbie Reynolds was on. I saw this film ages ago of course but had forgotten it and the story of the young Dominican nun whose voice and self-penned songs so enchanted the authorities of the convent that they allowed her to record her music for sale to visitors. I've since read that she thought the film was a fiction and didn't think much of it at all.

Sadly though the film ended up on a high the reality wasn't so positive. Sister Adel decided to leave the convent and the order in 1966 (the year the film was released I believe) because she felt that she could better serve God in the community. Her recording contract was pulled in the same year and she failed to reignite her singing career. She worked with autistic children and opened a school. In the 1970s the Belgian government announced that she owed a considerable amount of money to them for taxes on the earnings from her singing career, she responded by telling them that she had given most, if not all of that money to the Order and that therefore she didn't really owe anything. This battle continued over several years causing her to fall into further debt and on March 29 1985 she committed suicide with her life partner Annie Pecher in their apartment in Wavre, Belgium citing the financial problems as the reason for taking their lives. Tragically on the very same day that they died the Belgian preforming rights society awarded Jeanne Deckers a considerable amount of money which would have solved all her financial problems.

Sad huh? I thought I'd paste in the song that topped the charts all over the world and we can all hear again the voice that helped comfort the grieving in the post-President Kennedy world.

They aren't very good but I took some pictures of my friend Sue's visit to Northern Ireland and I am assured that if you click on the link below you can see them.

My Belfast/Causeway Facebook album.

I've been really lazy since we got back and that's my only reason for not writing anything.

Two days after we got back from holiday my friend Sue came to stay - our first guest in our first home together! I met Sue when I used to teach in Prague and we became good friends. We've stayed in touch since we all left Prague to return home - she lives in Australia but has family here in Ireland and England too. I met her at the airport and as soon as she came through customs we were chatting away like we'd never been apart. It had been at least five years but it made no difference at all. I consider myself lucky that I know several people that I have that kind of relationship with. Patrick and I showed her round Belfast and we also had a lovely trip out to see The Giants Causeway (click on the name to find out more) which was great to finally see as it is a place I have heard about since childhood. All in all it was just lovely to spend time with Sue and catch up with her again - Patrick and I are now talking about a trip out to Oz now!

The other big thing that has kept me away from Xanga has been my examination for my Diploma in Indian Head Massage. I sat the exam and did the practical test too on Monday. I flew back to Birmingham on Sunday afternoon and was back in Belfast by Monday night. I think I did okay in the exam and it will just be a case of "wait and see" now. On the subject of all things holistic I have two paying jobs ahead of me now and it has spurred me on to getting a name for my business and cards and leaflets sorted too. I still plan to get a 'proper' job but I am hoping that it will be only part time and that I can really build up a business here doing the various things I can now.

It's now late and I must get to bed but I will try and get some more pictures up soon as I took several of the Causeway amongst other things.

Woke up this morning to perfect going away weather - rain! I feel sorry for those whose holidays have just begun but it really does make leaving Paradise a bit easier. Unlike last year Patrick and I are reasonably clearheaded and both of us had packed before we went out for the last night out. Last year, for some reason John and I didn't pack till the morning, got very drunk, stayed out till 9am (ok that was just me!) and then had to run around at 12 with the cleaners shouting at us to get out! Doing it this way is SOOOO much more civilised!

Now we just have to kill time till we get to the airport, the flight is at 19:15 so we have around six hours to get up to some drunken bawdy mischief... or go souvenir shopping. Whatever we do it's going to be done in the rain and with huge black clouds rolling over the mountains to the sea... PERFECT!

May not get online again to say it so HAPPY NEW YEAR to you all!!!