Aaaargh, a sanitary bin bit my bum!

Today I feel a need to rant about toilets. Well not actually toilets more like small cubicles and large sanitary bins.

I took this picture of the toilets in the local Cineworld cinema. I headed for a quick tinkle, only to find that part of my arse (a proper ladies' bum, in that I have Marilyn Monroe-esque curves) ended grazing the not-so-sanitary sanitary bin.

Now I realise that the cinema wanted to help us ladies out from queuing whilst desperate by squashing 3 toilets into a space that should only have had 2, but if you are going to do that please invest in some smaller bins, because, as you can see from the photos, the bin's lid is actually over the edge of the toilet seat, so even ladies without a Monroe bottom would have the same problem.

Apart from it not being a comfy thing to do, the health/germ implications of sitting on a sanitary bin edge makes me cringe!

You may think I'm just having a rant about a local issue, but no, this has happened a lot recently in quite a few motorway services, a couple of theatres and a library!

So I am putting this out to the universe…….

If you make sanitary bins, could you please make a narrower version, or why not make a C shaped one that curves round the bowl to help us out.

Thanks for reading, and if you've had this same problem please leave me a comment below, or why not name and shame a bum pinching venue if there is one near you.

If enough people have this problem maybe we can make one of the big sani-bin firms listen.

Toodles
Karen Lee

Did you ever have a shocking moment of 'Ta-Dah!' ?

This blog is dedicated to all the innocent or naive people in the world.

I sit here writing this in a shocked state.

Did you ever have a moment of 'Ta-Dah!' that you just weren't expecting? I have just had one whilst listening to Radio 2 whilst they played Gene Pitney's 24 hours from Tulsa.

Now, I am 44 years old, so I know the song and have sung along with the chorus many of times, but I have never really 'listened' to the song. I have always thought it was a sweet song about a bloke on his way home to his wife, just calling to let her know he was close.

How wrong was I !!!

If you are like me and haven't ever connected the dots, I'll tell you what it is really about:

It's about a bloke on his way home who stops off somewhere a day away from home, meets another woman, does the dirty and is basically telling his current girlfriend/wife that he's not coming back!!!

SHOCKED!

I feel like Emma Pillsbury, Jayma Mays' character in Glee Season 3, when she found out what Afternoon Delight was really about (and no, I didn't know what this song was about either! I am soooooo naive).

Jayma said in an interview with E! 
"I didn't know it was so dirty, I don't know if I thought it was about pie, but I can remember singing that song with my parents when I was growing up. That's so creepy now."

"My mom and dad wrote me an email the next morning [after the episode] and were like, 'We had no idea what that meant!" Mays laughed. "We're like the most innocent family ever."


So, if like me you are a bit naive (only in some things *wink*) I hope I didn't shock you too much, and if you are worldly wise please be kind to us innocents, we need looking after.

Toodles
Karen Lee
(Note: I wrote this article a little while ago on another blog, but I think this is the more appropriate place for it.)

Reclaim the Fairy Cake!

Over the last 5 years the whole of Great Britain has been inundated with cake makers.
I am very partial to a cake or 4 so don't misunderstand me, I DO NOT have an issue with the cakes themselves. I DO however take issue with what these new batch of bakers are calling their creations .........CUPCAKES!!!!

Photo courtesy of  bakinginspiration.com

For at least the 44 years that I have been on this earth, these mini cakes, covered with icing, buttercream, hundreds & thousands and/or metallic sugar balls, have been a mainstay of every school fête, community events and kiddie parties.

They have been created by mums, grandmas, brownie troops and enthusiastic kids, and have been decorated with whatever could be found in the back of a deep kitchen cupboard, and for all this time, and probably a whole lot of years before I was born, they have been called FAIRY CAKES.

Photo courtesy of georgetowncupcake.com

So why do we now have a country full of 'cupcakes'?
The ever pervasive influence from our ex-colony, the good ol' U. S. of A. is the culprit. Someone, and there are a lot of claimants to this particular title, decided that if you took the humble fairy cake, gave it an unusual name such as Red Velvet or Lava Fudge, and then covered the top with various sickly sweet concoctions piled higher than the Eiffel Tower, then you could sell them for an obscene amount of money, to people with more money than sense (I only say this because this trend took flight in Beverley Hills!). 

As mentioned earlier Great Britain is full of bakers of all ages, so when this trend crossed the pond many people saw an opportunity to jump on the bandwagon and make a living doing something that they loved, but, and this is my big BUT, they allowed the American name to stay because, to be able to charge the big prices, they couldn't be seen to be related to the humble Fairy Cake.

My biggest objection to the cupcake name is that it's influence doesn't stop just at the fancy shops. Nowadays at the local fairs or the school fêtes the Fairy Cake has been usurped, and a whole generation of children think that the swirly topped, sponge creations, made to fit perfectly into a small hand are called Cupcakes. NO!!!!

Please, I beg of you all, can we keep our British names, don't let foreign invaders take over, and if you are from the land of the free, we like you, we really do, but please can you keep your Americanisms of our great language to yourselves.

To make up for your corruptions of our words, dear Americans it's time we gave you one back, so here it is. You can call an umbrella an umbrella if you wish, but over here it's called a Brolly. Enough said!
Toodles
Karen Lee

(I wrote this article a little while ago on another blog, but I think this is the more appropriate place for it.)

The unnatural contortions of a red carpet life.

I know it's been done for years, but recently it seems to have got more extreme.

What am I talking about?

I'm talking about the leg contortions that seems to be prevalent amongst the red carpet glitterati.

It used to be that you turned at an angle so that you weren't photographed from the full on front view. This was done so that the flattering 45˚ angle made you look thinner, and your curves were more prominent.

Which Hollywood / pop starlet wouldn't want that?

But nowadays the strange overly exaggerated leg cross seems to be in fashion. Nobody in the real world would strike this pose unless they were desperate for a trip to the ladies, but on the red carpet it is used to slim the look of your thighs, hopefully creating that Marilyn hourglass effect on women who, to be honest due to near starvation diets, haven't usually got any of their own curves left.

Some pull it off better than others. Reese Witherspoon is rarely seen on the red carpet without the crossed leg look, even perfecting it in this middle photo to seem like she has only one leg!

But there are one or two ladies who need a little more practice to get past the 'this is really not a natural pose' look.
To me Rosamund Pike looks like she may topple at any moment, and Beyoncé has got work to do, especially if she's wearing that split leg dress that magnifies any issues. She needs to have a chat with Reese.

You just have to take a quick look at InStyle's Look of the Day pages to see that more and more ladies are making the leg cross grade, but really is there something wrong with women looking like they have two legs, and showing off their curves as they really are?

I was going to use Jennifer Aniston as my example of a woman who doesn't do the leg cross, as most of the pics of her on the red carpet had her in a very natural stance, and I think she looks

AMAZING!

Could it be that she doesn't need to contort herself to create curves because she actually has some? Just a thought.

But then I came across Jennifer in leg cross mode. Noooooooo, not you too Jen!

Here is Jen in the same dress, one in a normal stance, one crossed, and I think she she looks equally stunning in both, though to me she looks happier and more natural in the uncrossed pic.
What do you think?

In this world where women have to measure up to ridiculous standards of beauty, where some even resort to surgery to achieve 'the look', could we please draw a line at having to also contort ourselves into highly unnatural poses too. I mean, would we see men contorting their bodies in this way just for a red carpet photo?

I don't think so!

Toodles
KLxx

If you have something you want to say please leave me a comment below or give me a share.

'The universe will provide' …curve balls!

I'm really not one of these people who think in airy-fairy terms, and I generally poo poo 'the universe will provide' kind of guff.

I'm a firm believer in getting down and doing it for yourself, but occasionally fate, the ether or whatever you wish to call it, throws me a curve ball, just when I need it.

Meeting my hubby was one of those curve balls. At the time I lived abroad, and my relationship there had just evaporated, along with the guy, but what I'd been left with was my dog Chrissie (his originally, but he up and left her too). When I decided to return to England Chrissie came too, and to pay for the quarantine kennels, there were no pet passports then, I had to get a second job. That job was working in the Ritzy nightclub in Bolton, and my now hubby was one of the 19 strong doormen that worked there.

Ta-dah. Curve ball.

If the ex hadn't buggered off, or if he decided to take Chrissie with him when he did, I would never in a million years have met the love of my life, which he is, though I don't tell him enough (oooh mushy bluurgh, I don't do mushy). So what was a pretty crushing sh*tty time of uncertainty became a blessing.

I've thought of this a number of times over the past 21 years, especially when I hear Garth Brooks' song Unanswered Prayers, which is about how if he'd had his prayers answered about a certain girl when he was younger, he'd have never met his wife (yes, I know he now has different wife than the one he originally sang about, but that's beside the point).
In the song he clocks this up to God, but I prefer the vagueness of something that we cannot comprehend like power, fate, destiny, ether, spirit etc.

A couple of other times curve balls have come my way, and yesterday I'm pretty sure another one appeared (I can't be completely sure until the future becomes as I imagine) that I hope will send my life off into a different direction, and like the last ones it has arrived just at the moment I was giving up on dreams, and getting disheartened with my future.

Maybe there is something to this 'the universe will provide' kind of guff, hmmmmm.

Toodles
KLxx

Please leave me a comment below, I read them all, or feel free to share this article on.

I must change my knickers more often!

I have an admission that I'm just going to put out there for you all to read….

I have a tendency not to change my knickers for a long time.

Now don't be alarmed by this, I don't mean I don't wear fresh knickers (panties, for my American friends) every day, I do, and I wash them too, but I am guilty of sticking to the same style until the little (or not so little) buggers have seen better days.

I'll find a shape I like and then buy them in as many colours as I can, or if there is only the one colour it won't bother me I'll just go ahead and fill my drawer with them. This means that I always have comfy kecks on (kecks, another British term for knickers), but, and there is a big BUT, this means that I hardly ever wear matching bra and knickers sets. I have a few, but they are for special occasions, where more than likely they won't be on for very long. You know what I mean. ;-)

What's so bad about that?

Well I got to thinking about comfort the other day when I saw this quote on Pinterest.

I started wondering if I have given away the passions of my soul, and have traded them in for a 'comfortable' 44 year old's version of life.
In my earlier years I would have never settled for comfort, my bloodied feet from squeezing into fashionable, ill-fitting shoes were testament to that fact, but lately I have found myself opting for easier/more comfortable/less challenging things, and I don't think it's doing me any good whatsoever!

 Knickers have become my symbol of this 'murder of passions'.

I shall elaborate…
Like I said I don't change the style of my undies until forced, usually because the shop no longer stocks them. When forced, I try to find the nearest style to my old ones, and if I can't , I will sulk for a while, and probably keep wearing the old ones until they are threadbare.
Change, I don't do change!

Sometime in my growing up I have sub-conciously decided that 'change is bad'. I don't know when this occurred, but it's making me miserable!

Like it says in this quote to the left, I am very bored with my general day to day existence and want to break out of 'these self imposed limits', but my nagging, careful, comfortable brain seems to put the kibosh on the 'trying something new' bit.

I am a strong headed woman who, if you read these blogs of mine you'll know, is pretty opinionated, and I feel like I can do just about anything I set my mind to, but I'm so frustrated with my inability to actually do the setting.

How do I get my mind/brain/electrons not to be afraid of change?

Here's the quote that tells me what to do!

My comfort zone, which really should be renamed to something along the lines of 'My Apathetic Zone', has become so big that I hardly recognise there is a world outside it. I see the outside in fleeting flashes in my mind, but the path to the new world is blurred.

I long for those glimpses.

So this is where knickers come into it!

I have bought myself some new knickers. These kecks are a low short shape, made of a micro fibre material that is silky to the touch and in fuchsia pink! They are nowhere near my usual hard wearing cotton mix, high leg, stripey patterned, bikini shape briefs. 

The Reason: I am using these undies as a catalyst to help me leave my comfort zone.

It's a small step, but if I keep finding little ones to take, sometime in the not so distant future, I may find myself escaping into the exciting world of my glimpses, living my dreams, finding my passions again, and my not-so-comfortable zone will fade into the distance.

As Neil Armstrong may have said if he was a woman

"One small step in new undies,

one giant leap to a passion filled life!"

Now I just have to find a ladylike way of fishing these new kecks out of the crack of my backside!

Thanks for reading, and if you liked it please share it on, or why not leave me a message in the comments box below.

KLxx

Emma Watson is a glowing light in a very dim celebrity driven world.

FIn this world of celebrity I get very dismayed at the worship of the uneducated (or pretending to be uneducated) bimbo style woman. We all know the types, the Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton and Katie Prices of this world who are lauded for nothing more than their bodies, sex lives and partners.

That said, Emma Watson seems to be one of the younger generation of women in the public eye that seems to have her head screwed on, as you can see from this snippet taken from Twitter. It just reiterates why she is definitely someone I would love more young girls to look up to.

Yes, the three women I mentioned must have pretty damn good business skills (or know how to pick good people to do it all for them; a skill in itself) to create so much wealth from so little, but my major bugbear is……. how many young girls look up to them for those skills (zero?), instead they think that pumping up their boobs, behaving badly, creating viral sex tapes and sleeping with the latest big sport/TV/film star will make them popular and provide an amazing lifestyle.

Once you grow up you realise life isn't quite that easy, and that sleeping your way through the British Premier League football squads etc. will get you things (but probably not the things you were after): a pretty dodgy reputation, possibly a nasty STD or two or a feeling of worthlessness when you realise you are being used over and over again.

These few women are the exceptions that skew the reality that most women have to educate themselves and work hard to gain a better place in society, a society that is still, unfortunately, very male biased.

Let's face it, Emma Watson is set for life after the Harry Potter films, and could easily just sit on a Caribbean beach playing footsie with a billionaire boyfriend for the rest of her existence, so when I read quotes from her about the importance of getting an education, being true to yourself and not following the pack, it makes my heart sing.

More GREAT QUOTES from Miss Watson

• I don't want other people to decide who I am. I want to decide that for myself.

• I'm not going to school just for the academics, I wanted to share ideas, to be around people who are passionate about learning.

• I want to be a Renaissance woman. I want to paint, and I want to write, and I want to act, and I want to just do everything.

• I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to be who I really am. I'm going to figure out what that is.

• All I can do is follow my instincts, because I'll never please everyone.

Thanks for reading. I love to read your comments, and if you like my ramblings please feel free share. 
KLx
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The perfect bra for big girls... in more ways than one!

As a tall lady I have many issues with clothes. Trousers that have never met my ankles, winter sleeves that give my wrists frostbite and bust darts that end up around my chest bones, but one of my biggest issues is bra straps.

A pretty full cup bra,
but with fixed shoulders it's a no-no!

Yes I did say Bra Straps!!!!

I like pretty bras with pretty designs, but I find that a lot of the nicer bras have fancy fixed straps up the front and sometimes over the top of the shoulder with just a small adjustable piece of elastic at the back. 

What's wrong with that?

Well when you are tall everything is elongated, and to get the straps actually on to your shoulder you'll probably need to extend your strap to the very longest point, and when half the strap is immovable it's just not going to happen.

I also have the added issue of rather large boobage.

This is me in my Cascade Pearl Bra.

The fingers are there to cover up the see-through nipple bits

which my hubby quite appreciated.

They've had a big of a growing spree over the past few years (something to do with weight and middle aged spread I think), much to my hubby's delight, and they are now officially a 36F!!!!

With both of my size issues, height & boobs, bra shopping is usually a bit of a pain. Well in contrast this week I have had a great time with a beautiful new bra from Silhouette Lingerie.



I got a 36F in the Pearl coloured Cascade full cup bra (in some brands I have to adjust my size, but Silhouette was spot on), and was delighted that the elastic straps are nice and long and not the ugly 2 inches wide variety that usually come along with the letter F on the tag.

 The fit was spot on; the lift was good, the wires sat perfectly underneath and there was no gap at the breast bone. With my body length I did have to put the straps to full length, but I didn't have any dig in on the shoulders which definitely made it a comfy fit.

I would usually go for a balconette shaped cup instead of a full cup, but sometimes you just want everything contained with no possibility of fall out if you just happen to break into a run (not the most likely of scenarios) so I thought I try this one and I'm really glad I did.

The Cascade Full Cup comes in Black, White & Pearl, and there are seasonal variations too, so I think I may be purchasing a couple more of these pretty bras, and I may also have a go with the Balconette cup too.

Just a little note: If strap length is a factor for you too, but you maybe don't have the hefty cup size that I do, check with the lovely people at Silhouette Lingerie to see if your size comes with the fully elastic straps, as I did notice on the website that a couple of the pictures show a more fixed lace strap (I think these may be on the smaller cup sizes).

I am not affiliated to Silhouette Lingerie and have no interests in the company, and links to the website have only been added for your convenience.

Thanks for reading
KL x

How I miss Robin Williams.

I'm just back from watching Night at the Museum 3, and it's a fitting end to the trilogy, but now my eyes look like I've gone ten rounds with Frank Bruno, all red and swollen.

Why?

Because of Robin Williams.

It's the last film he will ever be seen in (there is a voice role yet to be released), and I was in tears near the end of the film (partly because of the story, partly because of Robin), but the line that came up in the credits broke my heart and sent me over the blubbing edge. I won't put it here, because it should be watched. I headed to straight to the toilet to compose myself, then when I explained my reaction to hubby in the car on the way home I broke down again.

I never met him, but watched him with glee when I was younger in Mork & Mindy, and have watched pretty much every film he's been in, though I only own 2 videos with him in, Toys and his stand up at the MET show, but for some reason his death has hit me hard. It hit me at the time, and still does. If his death affects me this strongly, I daren't think how his family and friends have coped.

This world could do with him still being about, but he decided it was his time to leave. If there is somewhere to go past this existence, I hope he is having a ball, because everyone else there will be.

I've put a link on to one of my favourite Robin Williams moments where I feel I see the real man behind the fame, it's the time when he met Koko the gorilla and had a tickling and cuddling session with her. http://youtu.be/I9I_QvEXDv0

R.I.P. Robin Williams, you are missed.

Toodles

KL