No pain, no gain

I've never been the "sort" to pamper myself at the beauty parlour. In the last few months though with holidays and stuff, I have tried out a few little treatments.

Tonight I am going to a Gala Dinner at the Prestonfield hotel in Edinburgh. I visited their website to find out how to get there and it has co-ordinates for landing on their bloody helipad. Our helicopter is on the yacht at the moment so we'll be arriving by car!!!

So armed with this "it's gonna be a posh one" I have decided to indulge in some spa treatments this afternoon, a manicure, pedicure, a mini facial and a "wrap" to lost some inches. Since I have piled on the weight during the last few months it's definitely a case of "turd polishing".

Before I went on holiday in July, I had a fake bake spray tan. God it was hilarious. This lovely girl popped round to my house, I had to strip naked (bar from a g-string), I turned away for a minute, turned back and there was this huge pop up tent in the kitchen, since you don't want to be spraying the walls with fake tan. Now normally you have to wear self adhesive "sole" protectors on the feet to stop the tan from covering the underside of your feet. Well she'd run out of these so she handed me two sanitary towels to stick on my feet. So you can imagine the scene eh? After I stopped laughing she got me to stand in the tent and then sprayed me all over. I then stood chatting to her, almost naked covered in brown fake tan writing her a cheque, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Alex took one look at me and said "you look weird Mummy" I then had to sleep in the gunk and shower it off the following day, it did look good in the end though.

I also got my eyebrows "threaded" at Debenhams in Edinburgh. I was wandering through the cosmetics hall with Alex and spotted it . For those of you who don't know, "threading" is a way of removing hair using a twisted cotton thread, the majority of people who do it are Indian or Middle Eastern.

So I sat down in the chair right in the middle of Debenhams and the girl, who incidentally had NO sense of humour, took one look at me and said "you want upper lip doing too?" ERR "no thanks" I replied, then I said "aw go on then". BIG mistake, HUGE! OHHH the pain, forget childbirth, when someone is ripping hair out round your lip with a bit of cotton, the pain is awful. I got the giggles and had to get her to stop a couple of times, I said "oh I need you to stop a minute, it's very sore" I sat up and I'd drawn quite a crowd, most of whom were laughing! Eventually I got through the ordeal and I felt a lot better.

I am hoping today's treatment will be a lot less traumatic, wish me luck!

Keep on Running

See me? I am a TOTALLY allergic to exercise. I've blogged about this before, I bloody HATE it.

However thanks to the chemo I am now in "Chemopause", early Menopause caused by chemo which is a total bummer. I do however think myself very lucky since I have "seen 'orf" the cancer, so what if I now have premature menopause?

Symptoms of the "change" include hot flushes (very yucky), mood swings (yippety-dee!) and putting on weight around the middle, top and bottom, well, basically anywhere. The size of my arse is now a major concern and so after months of saying I must do some exercise I have actually started!

Cyclists and runners make me see red, I think they have a certain air of smugness about them which makes me want to punch them in the nose............but, confession time.....I have started running!

Yes Siree Bob, yours truly, the couch potato, wine guzzling lardy, has started running.

AND, although I have only been doing it a week, I now know why runners look smug, it's because it's actually quite good.

I have started very slowly by using a fab iPhone application (see there has to be some sort of geek element to it ) called "Get Running" it costs a mere 59P! Now if that ain't a bargain I don't know what is. In 9 weeks of running 3X per week I should be able to run 5K in 30 mins. So far this week I have been out 3 times, you warm up with a fast walk for 5 mins then run for 1 minute\walk for 1.5 mins, this run\walk combo is repeated 8 times and topped off with a 5 mins cool down fast walk. It's bloody brilliant and you can set off a playlist on the iPod and it will "talk over" the music to tell you when to run and walk.

It's genius and if I can do it, literally anyone can. If you have an iPod touch or iPhone it'll work. Hopefully I will carry on with this, I've bought 2 running books off Amazon too. Off to revel in my smugness now......