Dammit. DAMMIT!

After a near-perfect holiday, full of sleep, alcohol and relevations, I am back. With a mouth ulcer. A stye. A raw throat. And an appalling attitude. It's so bad that I have seriously considered putting the children onto eBay. (they won't let you post humans - bastards) Unsurprisingly, after telling Liam that he needed to help me unpack the car, I was informed that he would like to change moms. I had to chew my tongue off to keep from taking him up on that. Charming.

So my plan for the year was to turn my 'nice business' into an uber-profitable powerhouse, to travel overseas 4x this year (at least once with a girlfriend, somewhere exotic - Istanbul me thinks), find a source of considerable passive income, get into the best bloody shape of my life, start cooking sublime, nutritious meals for my family, squeeze in at least 80% of the 26 (!!!) kids' lifts I now have to do weekly, redo my bedroom, Ben's room and David's study, have more dinner parties (request of husband), find a challenging and creative hobby, start dancing lessons again, go back to learning French, read more, sleep more, drink less, swear less (you can see that the logic is fucked already) and spend plenty of calm, connected quality time with my kids.

I have managed to get into a 5am gym routine, which has been excellent. And aside from the children's sour sweets and the family-size box of chocolate chip biscuits I comfort-ate for dinner tonight, I have been following a reasonably solid diet, courtesy of Tim Ferris's 'Four Hour Body' book. David and I have also quit drinking (!!!) for the month of January, which has actually been a blessing, because I can't imagine being this chronically pissed off whilst hungover.

Perhaps I over-shot a bit.

Let me create the context. We came home from idyllic Knysna to:

- No water (cut off for 2 days on our return)
- No phone lines (cut off twice by Telkom, erroneously...I hate them)
- Broken TV
- Broken security cameras
- A MAJOR wasp infestation
- No Malawian houseman
- A massive leak in the staff room
- An even more massive leak in our sprinkler system
- No ADSL connection for my business (we've now been down for 9 days - I hate Telkom)

The likes of such domestic admin is time consuming and when it involves dealing with monopolies like Telkom (did I mention that I hate them?), it renders you completely helpless. Compound this with a 4 year old that is outrageously demanding at the moment and a 2 year old that cries and tantrums almost constantly and you have moi: angry, ulcered, feverish, pissed off moi.

Right. Well that was more of a vent than a blog. If you didn't like it, go ahead and tell me to my face. I dare ya.