Head's up!

Hi I'm back again and I guess it's your personal point of view whether I've been away too long and have not posted often enough or you may think "Oh my God, no! She's back!"
I would sincerely hope that none of you think the latter because it would be much simpler to stay away if you did (laughs), almost as much as I seem to do.

Work has keep me extremely busy and when I do get home it's so much easier to just relax over mails and messages and what ever else I need to do and then I try to keep it simple by just chatting with net friends from around the world over my hot cocoa rather than post a blog. Obviously when the weekends arrive and I have much more free time, I do try to fit a post in while I'm busy in my home.
Please forgive me the long wait between posts.

The office has finally hired one new girl and so the seemingly constant and heavy work-loads that we have endured since we lost two more members of staff have started to ease a little and whereas I do like to be kept busy at work, I don't like that awful feeling of always being slightly behind schedules and forever chasing the seconds, which I think most of the staff have been feeling lately. Now we have a moment to breathe again and a moment for a nice hot steaming cup of liquid refreshment and a moment to recharge our creative flair.

Hey how do you all like my new blog header?

Anyone familiar with my old blog site of 'Jazz Journals' will probably have suspected that sooner or later I would start to put up a little personal redecoration here. This image of course may change over time as it did evolve slowly across my other site from one image to the next.
Do you remember them?
Here is a reminder of the evolution of my 'Jazz Journals headers.

This week I have had some interesting chats with various people about various topics from the inane to the insane, from the luscious to the ludicrous and from the stimulating to the stagnating.

Throughout all of these conversations do I worry what people think of me?
Should I?
Of course I would like people to think well of me and it is really important that those close to me think well of me too, so I think my answer would be a resounding "yes" across most situations. I really don't like upsetting people and I do try, as far as my patience and tolerance allows me, to be understanding. I do have a caring nature and often I may change my plans and schedules to make allowances for the feelings and needs of others but I won't ever change my own personal values or ethics to accommodate the wishes and desires of others. Rarely an individual may, in my consideration, be unworthy of any of my time or efforts and I will just merely dismiss them and as harsh as that may sound, I believe you too can also imagine a situation where you would do exactly the same thing.
I think that I can be stubborn and hard despite my small size and some may interpret that as horrible, especially where I am not prepared to yield to an idea or reason because it goes against my belief or needs or I have a counter-reason. A child who I refuse candy to could also interpret that as me being horrible but I may have my reasons even if that child cannot always understand them. Very often what we what we want is not what we need and what we need is not always what we have!
Do then my or our reputations crawl home with their tails between their legs?

Reputations are strange things and any eyes upon mine may see quite different shades and shapes. They can be undeservedly lost or equally they can be unjustifiably acquired and in either condition this tells us very little about the actual owner of such a reputation and more about the credulity or the vindictiveness of those who bestow them. History is like a magnifying lens in this aspect where it can enhance or exacerbate the reputation of those historical figures. Great generals become braver and more cunning and evil criminals become more ruthless and despicable and perhaps beautiful women were more beautiful than their contemporary counterparts of today. The present where our reputations exist today seem quite small and insignificant by comparison. It is perhaps a measure of personal judgment and perhaps unfairly it make take you a lot of work and many many good deeds to make yourself a good one and yet just one bad deed to lose it.
So in regard to how others think of us, our reputations, I would of course like to be thought of as a good friend, a helpful and kind person, funny, witty and hopefully one person will say I was the best lover of all.
Don't you want that?
The choice of how you are thought of by others is yours in the way you live your life. But no matter what you do, you will always have critics and people with envy or other issues and those thoughts in their minds are the filters through how they see you and your life.

I'll say "hello" to Ivo, a fairly new reader of several months, who made a post on his own blog regarding my April first blog.

Once he'd asked to see the real albums I asked him to let me know what he thought with a little constructive criticism perhaps. I had expected him to add a comment here and not create a whole post on his own site about it.

Thanks Ivo.

Hopefully you will all forget what I do each April first and I'll get some of you next year with a new trick.