Nicola Tweed

Today's Thoughtful Thursday is short and sweet, both blog wise and thought wise. My intention wasn't for this week's thought to be short but unfortunately due to a lack of skype funds the thought only lasted 4 minutes. Boo!

Yesterday was a manic day at work which in all honestly seems to the norm these days, I say it's down to some awesome Ruby Orchard marketing and of course the silly season fast approaching! In addition to this I had a client project to work on in the evening, fold the washing, do the dishes and most importantly squeeze in a run. The day was busy enough and the to do list seemed to be endless but as soon as I got home I dropped everything logged into Skype and dialled a friend that I knew needed some cheering up!

This said friend has had one cray cray year and after all the craziness she decided last week to quit her job and pursue the life of a house wife. Sometimes you do just need a time out to reevaluate your life. Her days are now spent filled with with wifely chores, such as day 5 which consisted of, in her own words, 'sitting next to a schizophrenic on the bus searching the city for a fibre optic, pop up Christmas tree.' Hmmm very interesting!

Anyway our 4 minutes consisted of lots 'Oh Mys' and 'it's so nice to hear your voice' and 'wow thank you for phoning!' It made me smile from ear to ear and wish that we could have done it in person over a glass of wine but sadly the distance didn't allow.

Taking the time out from my busy day was so worth it!

Oh yes and my Thoughtful Thursday actually happened yesterday but I'm carrying it through to today because we have scheduled in a proper Skype date for this evening! Yay! 

Stop being such a lemon and freeze your sunshine ball!

A few weeks ago I got the best tip from a colleague which was to freeze my lemons in order to benefit from the amazing vitamins and nutrients to be found in the skin. You see apparently the skin contains as much as 5 to 10 times more vitamins than the lemon juice itself! Wow who knew?!

How to do it?
Simple...place a washed lemon into your freezer, once it's frozen take it out, get your grater and get grating. You gotta show us your arm muscles here! Then put it all into a zip seal bag and pop it back in the freezer - ready for topping your favourite meal!

What can I use it on?
Salads, ice cream, soup, cereals, noodles, spaghetti sauce, rice, sushi, fish dishes, whiskey, the list is endless.
My personal favourite is with Greek style yogurt & muesli!

Bon Appetite! 

I've never really thought of setting goals for my blog. I mean is it really something people do?!? And if they do what kind of goals do they set? Get 1000 more facebook likes, tweet more, post more.....

Anyway so the electricity went out last Thursday evening (load shedding I presume) so I grabbed a pen and my ideas journal and furiously started scribbling down my goals. At first my list started to resemble the above goals, not bad but just not the type of genuine goals that were going to make me stay up, with match sticks keeping my eyelids open, to get an amazing blog post done. These goals felt flakey, insincere and darn right boring! I wanted goals that were refreshing, freeing and creatively inspiring. Sadly in that moment it just didn't seem to be flowing onto the page quite as much as I liked so I abandoned ship and decided rather to sink myself into a hot bath surrounded by the apple spice scent of my Foreva candle. And yup you guessed it, my lack of flow was cured!

The inspiring thoughts & goals started to swirl around freely and words like connection, community, learning, teaching, encouraging, uplifting & identity rose to the surface. From those words I strung together these 4 attainable goals that feel genuine to me....

1//  Learning & Identity
'I've now come to realise that there are too many mediocre blogs out there that just re-post other people's creative content.' A great tip I learnt from Roxy of City Girl Searching was that you need to post original content on your blog, photos included. So to bring learning & identity into my blogging I will be getting the manual for my camera out of the box and snapping away more often next year. My impossible blog list would say I'll only be using my own pictures from now on but this is a realistic list so I'm going to set myself the goal of using my own pictures in 50% of my posts... so that's every second post. So doable!

2// Teaching
I am a IT geek at heart and have read, Googled and taken many courses on the ins and outs of blogging. I confess I'm not perfect and I don't know everything yet but what I do know is that there are people out there that could learn from the things I know. I've made a looooooooong list of posts and have scheduled in a blogging tutorial post for every week. I find when I do posts like these it's a fun way for me to cement my knowledge and learn even more!

3// Connection & Community
Blogging in 2014 won't only be about me, myself and my laptop. It will be about creating a blogging support group - an agreement between several bloggers to comment, share, tweet & facebook each others work. Guest blogging, offering their services and encouraging each other to blog bigger, bolder and better! If you're  a blogger and interested in some support then drop me a comment below, I'd love to hear from you.

4// Guest Posting
My biggest goal for 2014 is to get my musings out there into the big world wide webs. That means guest posting, yikkkeees, what if they say no?! I'm setting myself a goal of at least one guest post a month and I've drafted a list of who and where I'd like my thoughts to featured. Plan sorted!

Tell me fellow bloggers have you set your goals for 2014 yet? and if so what are they?

“Be brave. Even if you’re not, pretend to be. No one can tell the difference. Don’t allow the phone to interrupt important moments. It’s there for your convenience, not the callers. Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is. Don’t burn bridges. You’ll be surprised how many times you have to cross the same river. Don’t forget, a person’s greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated. Don’t major in minor things. Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Helen Keller, Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Learn to say no politely and quickly. Don’t use time or words carelessly. Neither can be retrieved. Don’t waste time grieving over past mistakes Learn from them and move on. Every person needs to have their moment in the sun, when they raise their arms in victory, knowing that on this day, at his hour, they were at their very best. Get your priorities straight. No one ever said on his death bed, ‘Gee, if I’d only spent more time at the office’. Give people a second chance, but not a third. Judge your success by the degree that you’re enjoying peace, health and love. Learn to listen. Opportunity sometimes knocks very softly. Leave everything a little better than you found it. Live your life as an exclamation, not an explanation. Loosen up. Relax. Except for rare life and death matters, nothing is as important as it first seems. Never cut what can be untied. Never overestimate your power to change others. Never underestimate your power to change yourself. Remember that overnight success usually takes about fifteen years. Remember that winners do what losers don’t want to do. Seek opportunity, not security. A boat in harbor is safe, but in time its bottom will rot out. Spend less time worrying who’s right, more time deciding what’s right. Stop blaming others. Take responsibility for every area of your life. Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get. The importance of winning is not what we get from it, but what we become because of it. When facing a difficult task, act as though it’s impossible to fail.”

I only started blogging at the beginning of this year... 16th February to be exact. My first post was open, honest, maybe a little too dreamy but definitely the beginning of a journey of many many lessons. Blogging has given me a platform to messily play with photoshop, words and html coding (yup IT Geek I am!). It's brought me back in touch with a lot of the hobbies I used to get lost in when I was younger, in some instances by younger I mean like 18 or 19! Blogging allows me to be in a state of flow - you know when you get so busy doing you forget where the time went?!

I've picked my own brains for some of the most important things I've learnt in the last 10 months, some of them may be obvious to you but it's always worth checking over your blog so that you give your readers the pleasant experience you intended!

1// A blog post does not take 5 minutes, sometimes it can take up to an hour or even more. I've know some bloggers who can take up to a week on a post! Blogging is not just about clicking the Publish button. It's about putting your heart and soul in print, mulling over the words, editing, writing, editing then writing some more and then finally when you feel you have done your best allowing your readers to pour over your fine work.

2// Your About page is possibly one of your most visited page, so what does it say about you? Does it fully express who you are, why you blog, where you've come from. I believe every person has a good story to tell and that every good story needs to be told. So tell it dammit! Also make sure it's up to date, we make memories everyday and so your about page should be ever evolving to keep up with these memories.

3// Pictures speak the loudest on your blog. The colour, the size, the layout... you name it. It really can make or break a blog. Grainy pictures are a no no! To avoid this learn what the pixel width of you blog posting area is and make sure your picture widths are either bigger or the same size as this. My best tip for making your blog look attractive is to make all your pictures the same width, it creates uniformity in your posts. I also like to start my posts off with a picture - it's an easy way to get your bloggers attention!

4// Facebook, Instagram, Twitter & Pinterest... yes they are A MUST! I personally wouldn't say that you have to be on all four but I'd say at least two is good. These guys are like your Gossip Girl minions, they do all the hard work while Blair (your blog) reaps the benefit! Important - make sure your minions are working harder than your blog e.g include an additional picture quote that you enjoyed on facebook.

5// Have an archive & use Linkwithin (or something similar) it's a sure fire way of getting your bloggers attention and keeping them around for longer. One of my favourite things is reading other bloggers first posts and everything in between. I like to see where they started and how far they've come... it's sort of an inspiration thing!

6// Raining days are my favourite kind of creative days, anything I type or paint or code seems to turn to gold! Now even though it does rain a lot in the Midlands (well lately that is) these creative days don't come all that frequently so when they do I knuckle down and get as much as I can done on my blog. This past weekend was the perfect example, I created 4 posts, changed my social media buttons, updated my About & Contact page and more. So what I'm trying to say is that when a creative spark hits you, use it wisely and build up a little nest of posts for those days when you really ain't all that into the blogging thang!

7// Post, post, post... within reason & within quality of course! Point 6 is your best tip for keeping up with the continuous post party. You could also try a blogging schedule and throw some easy regular weekly features into the mix. The best example I can give you is Rachel from In Spaces Between who used to do a weekly round up on a Tuesday of the latest blogs she was loving - it was something that brought me back to her site time and time again and it was a fairly easy post for her to do every week!

8// Your blog layout is like your 2 minutes on the X-Factor... you only get a click or two to wow a new reader so don't scare them away. Personally I prefer a clean crisp blog, 3 colours and fonts max! But everyone is different. These days a theme for blogger or wordpress is fairly easy to come by for cheap so really no one has an excuse.

9// Broken links are things that drive sane people crazy. Ensuring all you links work is a biggie and will only take a few minutes to check before you click the Publish button. Another thing you must ensure is that all your links open in a new window, why? well if your blog reader opens a link in the same window as your blog then that's them gone, you blog is a distance memory of a crumb in the interwebs.

10// Genuinely commenting on other blogs will get you noticed, ever so slightly but it will get you noticed! Note I said genuine, not just a 'nice' or 'lovely' comment. Bloggers want to hear what their readers have to think about what they've written - share your opinion, your gratitude, a link you found that they may be interested in etc. Your a blogger, what would you like other people to say on your blog?!

If you have any other blogging tips that you've learnt please share them with me in the comments below. I'd love to hear the lessons that have made you the amazing blogger you are today!  

I crawled into bed early yesterday evening and devoured chapter one word for word. Anne Lamott doesn't candy coat anything in the first couple of pages, she is blunt to the point and zaps any publishing dreams budding writers have.

She gets straight to heart of being a good writer, with her first tip being to write about telling the truth and starting with your childhood. She says 'Plug your nose and jump in, write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O'Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just start getting it down.'

I'm so excited to spend a weekend of writing about my childhood (for my eyes only) and getting some more tips from Anne! 

I find beautiful and creative work on the inter webs ALL THE TIME but just sometimes I stumble upon something that completely blows my socks off, like today's Too good not to share... today's share is the Jennifer Grey's tumblr/blog, yup that Jennifer, you know Baby from Dirty Dancing! Her blog is filled to the brim with beautiful pictures, inspirational words and lovely musings. Her musings are truthful, honest and vulnerable making you love her even more!

Don't you just love these?! My personal favourite is the first one because I am a huge Toy Story fan... I can clearly remember the day I bought the first movie!

These beautiful prints were created by graphic design artist Rachel Krueger and are perfect for the Pixar cartoon movie fans like me. Do check out her other work it's pretty rad!

Ever since I can remember I've always wished that there was a little price tag above everyone's head containing their bank balance. I'm not entirely sure why I've wished this but lately I'm beginning to believe it's got something to do with finding out how much the people around me value themselves!



I'm on week 5 of 'May Cause Miracles' by Gabrielle Bernstein and it's all about raising your self worth to raise your net worth. Gabby says your bank balance is directly linked to how you see yourself and what you believe you deserve. If it's a little low then she suggests changing your thoughts on what you believe to be true about yourself and forgiving yourself for any past financial mistakes. What she also says, which I love, is that you need to shift your focus from needing money for your self-worth to wanting money to support your great work!

I've had to adjust my spending habits since coming back to South Africa simply because I am no longer earning the London city life salary anymore and you know what?! I'm okay with that! I'm more conscious of where my money goes and exactly what I do want to spend my money on... no more wasted money on hectic boozy nights! Another reason I'm okay with that is because I'm no longer bombarded with the constant 'YOU NEED THIS' advertising that consumes you in London. It was the one thing I enjoyed getting away from on my yearly breaks to Botswana. You see Botswana has like only a handful of shops and like zero advertising and so a 3 week holiday back home was always like a reset on the priority button for me. I appreciated what I had, my family & sunshine, and felt fulfilled and didn't need the 'latest' mascara to make me happy!

To me there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a bank balance with several digits but it's the reasoning behind why you want it? Using it to elevate your status will never bring more abundance into your life, whereas when you see it as a source to create, serve and enjoy the gifts of life there will be an easy flow of abundance in your life. I'm working on my why at the moment because yes I'd like a bigger bank balance but I'd also like to serve more and enjoy the gifts of life!

I found this great video by Denise DT on serving and deserving. She talks about not feeling guilty about receiving money for the work that you do and feeling entitled to receiving money for the work that you do! I love her work and her books! Check her out!  

About 2 months ago I finally upgraded to a proper smart phone... you know the ones where facebook and twitter actually work! Right now the old phone is fast collecting dust at the back of my cupboard while my new phone is out there mingling with the latest apps,snaps and chats.

Now I know most people worldwide have an iPhone and have like every app available to them but here in the RSA it isn't the most cost effective so Samsung & the android operating system have taken over - big understatement - literally everyone at our our braai this weekend had a Samsung phone!

So anyway I thought I'd do a little post on my favourite photo apps for Android to help us be as trendy as our Apple friends...

1// Picq


By far my most favourite app! There are several different photo layout options include star, heart and oval cut out shapes. You can include different background colours and backgrounds, stickers, frames and more! And the best is it's FREE!

2// Piclab


PicLab's tag line is 'fun photo editing' and that is exactly what it is. This app allows you to add beautiful typography and art work to your pictures giving them that extra little something. Love it!

3// Pixlr-Express

What's not to love?! Pixlr is my favourite free online editor, yes it beats Picmonkey hands down! It's easy to use and has the best photo layout options.

4// Instagram


Duh! Of course Instagram would be a favourite! I love how Instagram is a loving source of inspiration especially when I really don't feel like eating healthy or working out! 

'Imagine living your life without fear of expressing your dreams. You know what you want, what you don't want, and when you want it. You are free to change your life the way you really want to. You are not afraid to ask for what you need, to say yes or no to anything or anyone.

Imagine living your life without the fear of being judged by others. You no longer rule your behavior according to what others may think about you. You are no longer responsible for anyone's opinion. You have no need to control anyone, and no one controls you, either.

Imagine living you life without judging others.You can easily forgive others and let go of any judgments that you have. You don't have the need to be right, and you don't need to make anyone else wrong. You respect yourself and everyone else, and they respect you in return.

Imagine living without fear of loving and not being loved. You are no longer afraid to be rejected, and you don't have the need to be accepted. You can say "I love you" with no shame or justification. You can walk in the world with your heart completely open, and not be afraid to be hurt.

Imagine living your life without being afraid to take a risk and to explore life. You are not afraid to lose anything. You are not afraid to be alive in the world, and you are not afraid to die.

Imagine that you love yourself just the way you are. You love you body just the way it is, and you love your emotions just the way they are. You know that you are perfect just as you are.' - The Four Agreements

10 Tips for creating an effective email signature...

1// An email signature is literally free marketing! Think about how many emails you send on a daily basis and who you send them too. If they are reading your emails then it's the perfect opportunity to point them to your website, blog, facebook page, pinterest page... you name it!

2// Don't go over board with your email signature. Keep it short and sweet. Include your name, business name, position in the business, telephone number and links to your website/blog & social media links.

3// Include your logo but make sure it's embedded into your email signature correctly and hugely important make sure it's not a massive file otherwise it will either block up email inbox's or get thrown into the junk folder.

4// Make sure your links to your website/blog/facebook etc are correct and work properly. It's my pet hate when I click on a link and it doesn't work!

5// Don't include any gimmicky images or quotes. It's business keep it professional!

6//  When including social media links use the full link instead of just the little 'facebook' button. Unless of course if the image links you to your facebook page.

7// Double check everything in your signature is correct, you'd had to miss out on a hit to your blog or a phone call just because you didn't check you signature correctly.

8// Having your details at the bottom of your emails avoids the back and forth emails if you are trying to organise a meeting... the customer knows all your details just by looking at your signature.

9// Make sure your signature ties in with your brand. Is the font the same, how about the colour?

10// You can use your signature to promote up and coming events or promotions but be careful not to over do it, like I said before you don't want to end up in the junk box!