Traffic in Sao Paulo

This just about sums up my experience of driving in Brazil! It is never simple to go anywhere. There are one way roads everywhere, you can't turn right on red and more often than not, you can't turn left across a main road. Which means you really need to know exactly where you're going! If you are not in the correct lane, who knows where you'll end up! We've done a lot of driving since we've been back, and I will illustrate a few interesting situations we've found ourselves in.

On our way to our prospective apartment, we were using David's iPhone's GPS to direct us when we noticed that to turn left, we first had to turn right, left and left again, thus allowing us to cross the road, rather than just turn left. In my diagram, the red shows where we wanted to go and the blue represents how we actually did it! Notice that the first right turn takes us onto a "one way" road that in effect has us driving on the left side of the road. And this is not the first road I've seen in Brazil like this!
As we were returning from the ministry center (about an hour and a half away), we were driving back on one of the main highways, which has been under heavy construction and development in the past year or so. Being away for three months, our usual exit strategy didn't work. We were in the process of changing lanes to get over to the right to take an exit, but instead found ourselves on an overpass taking us where we didn't want to go. Thankfully we had our handy GPS and used it to navigate through some back streets to avoid the increasingly heavy rush hour traffic on the main drags. The red shows where we wanted to go, the blue shows where we ended up!

And if this isn't enough, Sao Paulo has a weird system called Rodizio. It means cars with license plates starting with a certain number can't drive in the center of the city from 7:00 to 10:00am and 5:00 to 8:00pm (i.e rush hour) on a specific day. So on Wednesday our car is out of commission for those hours.
Of course, this just makes life that much more interesting, and I still love to drive! So if you ever find yourself behind the wheel in Sao Paulo, don't forget your GPS!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

No excuses

So, my last attempt to blog from my iPad and include an image didn't really work; I was forced to spend $2.99 to purchase an app to be able to do what I want to. Now, let's see if the money spent will help me blog; after all, I've got to make it worth it, right? I've got no more excuses!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Experimental post

I've had a few blog posts running around in my head these past few days, and haven't exactly kept to my "just do it" plan! One of my big reasons (i.e excuses) is that I can't upload photos into my blog posts from my iPad. So, procrastinator extraordinaire that I am, I've been searching for an iPad app that gives me that option! So this is my test post from the Monarch app. Its a free app that I'm trying out. I always try to get away with using a freebie, but I wonder if I bought one, if that would help my inspiration?

Here is painting I found when searching in google for an image to add to this post. I only got a little distracted by reading the article that it came from! Hmmm, distraction is a good theme to blog about in relation to procrastination now, isn't it?

Procrastinator extraordinaire!

Yup, that's me. After all, this post was supposed to happen sometime in January - actually close to the beginning of the month. You know, the one where you write about all the resolutions you're going to keep this year... Well, I wanted to blog more...but it hasn't really worked out so far, but here I go and really, it's only February!

I'm sitting in bed, the kids are asleep and I'm wondering why it has taken me so long to get down to blogging, I mean it's not that hard, right? In fact, it's taken me a good 10 minutes to convince myself that I should just start writing, with my brain coming up with all sorts of random excuses such as; it's getting late, it's hard to type on an iPad, I really need to cut my nails (yes, a super lame excuse) and so on.

This has made me think about other areas of my life and how we can get into habits of procrastinating that seem to build up until it really becomes a problem. You know the things I'm talking about - leaving the dishes overnight, not taking the extra 5 seconds to put your clothes away, checking facebook just once more before settling down to do a task. The more we allow ourselves to "get away with" putting something off, the more we are robbing ourselves of a productive and satisfying life. The days when I am busiest are usually the ones that are the most satisfying.

The other issue I think I have with blogging, for example, is that I think about it too much and build up a huge expectation in my mind - maybe I am a perfectionist too! So when I sit down to write and it doesn't come out the way I have imagined it, I just give up. And again am left with nothing! I see this in other areas of my life, but more on that later,...maybe.

So, procrastinator and perfectionist that I am, this year I will strive to embody the Nike slogan, "just do it" and stop thinking and planning so much.

And now I'm off to cut my nails, because it really is hard to type on an iPad with long nails!