I was tagged for this meme by the lovely M from Eastern Max. These are the rules:

I have to answer 6 questions about myself. At the end of the post, I then tag 6 people and post their names, then go to their blogs and leave them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read my blog. Then, I must let the person who tagged me know when I’ve posted my answers.

6 places I have lived

1. Australia - for most of the time! Born in Kalgoorlie, WA and lived there 6 months; lived in Perth (14 years and more to come), Sydney (8 years) and the Central West, NSW (2 years in the 70s, nearly 2 years in the 00s)
2. Fiji - 1 year in the 70s
3. England - 1 year in the 00s
4. France - 6 months in the 00s
5. Saudi Arabia - 2 years in the 00s
6. Mexico - 2 years in the 00s (now, in fact)

What I was doing 10 years ago?

10 years ago I was living in Perth, working in a law firm (miserably), and was just about to move in with Rocky. We were busy planning a 2 month holiday to Europe to ski in France for 6 weeks and traipse round Spain for 2. It was a holiday that cemented our relationship. We got engaged a few weeks after getting back from that holiday.

The less said about that, the better.

What will I be doing 10 years from now? Looking back on a particularly bleak time in my life, hopefully from a much happier place (whatever that may be). But, eek! I’ll have a teenager in the house then!

5 things on my to-do list today

1. Pack up the contents of my pantry, and the mountains of toys and clothes that we are donating to the local orphanage (I have been ruthless with culling our stuff and it’s very liberating!)
2. Monitor Guerita’s temperature and administer medicine for her fever (poor little thing got sick after all the excitement of the ballet concert)
3. Clean the car ready to sell it tomorrow
4. Plan our 3 days in Disneyland next week - how many Disney Princesses do you thing we can meet??
5. Work out what clothes to stock up on for the kids when hitting the shops in LA!

Snacks I like to eat

• Anything chocolate, so it’s best not to keep too much in the house
• If I’m feeling fancy, crackers with blue cheese and dried apricots (divine combination)
• A more realistic (and un-fancy) version - bran crackers with butter and vegemite

If I was a billionaire

I once had a very detailed plan about what I would do with the money if I won Lotto. I realised I would be disappointed if I won anything less than about $20 million, because I would want to give $1 million to each of my family members (and there’s lots of them) and have some left over to have a nice house (not a mansion), a nice (not fancy) car and be able to afford regular travel, with some left over to donate a chunk to the Children’s Hospital in Perth. One of my family members works there, and Guerita was a regular outpatient there for her first few years with treatment on her feet. We never had a pay a cent for all our visits there, including surgery, and I always was struck by how tough it must be for families with children with far worse problems than ours. Improving the facilities there is a worthy cause, I reckon.

I’d have no problem with that if I was a billionaire. I don’t think I can really conceive how much money that is so its hard to know what to do with it. It’d be certainly nice to know the mortgage was paid, and the kids were provided for, and I’d probably go on a little spending spree for myself, to indulge my love of gadgets!

6 bloggers to go next:

Super Sarah
Gemisht
Planning Queen
Katef
Trish
Amanda

Feel free to ignore the tag if you’d rather not do the meme!

The day of the Festival de Ballet finally came. There was much excitement - Guerita could hardly contain herself and bounced round the house waiting for the time to go off for hair and make-up again. This time she coped well with sitting still and chatted away with the other girls about how they were going to look like Princesas and dance beautifully on the stage.

They really did look gorgeous when they were all done up in their costumes, which were based on the Barbie Island Princess movie.

The concert itself was very entertaining - much better than I expected, actually. The costumes and choreography were so well done - very professional and I was impressed with the standard of the dancing. Not that I am in any way an expert on technique or anything, but they certainly seemed to be doing a good job, didn’t make any major mistakes and looked like they were really enjoying themselves. I must admit I enjoyed the first half of the program more than the second half. Guerita’s dance (the “Baby Ballet” class) was one of the first ones and was very sweet. There was lots of fluttering arms and “butterfly style” dancing.

The rest of part one was the bigger girl’s ballet and tap dancing. They did an excellent Irish Dance routine which I really liked. I actually did an Irish Dancing class with a few girlfriends a few years ago, for a bit of fun, and I was surprised by how much I loved doing it. I think Michael Flatley and the Lord of the Dance is a bit naff, but I am a sucker for “formation” dancing (whether its tap or ballet or whatever - I draw the line at bootscooting though) so I loved this one in particular. I much prefer that to solo dancing.

The second half was Jazz, Hip Hop, Belly Dancing and Latin Dancing, which was less to my tastes. There were lots of “Jazz Hands” and midriffs showing and inappropriate music, like the 6-8 year olds dancing to something with lyrics like “I’m sexy. I’m horny. They call you Mr Personality because you so ugly.” And I’m obviously now an old woman, because I just can’t see the point of learning Hip Hop - how hard is it point your fingers, jump up and down and stamp your feet?

Anyway, it was a good night. It was one of the end of year events that I made a decision to stay here for (for Guerita’s sake) and I am glad we did. It would have been a shame for her to miss out on this.

Today was the photo session for Guerita’s ballet concert, so full hair & make-up was required. After much worry about how I would manage to do her hair and make-up, I chickened out and arranged for someone to do it for her! I discovered that the ballet school had a hairdresser and make-up artist available to do it for anyone who wanted - and the price was only $30 total for hair and make-up for both days (the photos and the concert) which I thought was a pretty good deal. Particularly since it turned out the hair was not to be done in a bun, but ringlets and I don’t even own a curling wand. I was happy to completely avoid the embarrassment (for me and Guerita) of doing a shoddy job.

Guerita was pretty excited about the prospect of going off to have all this done, although the reality of it all was a bit more tedious. We had to wait for a while before she got started and then she was required to sit still for over an hour! Not an easy feat for her.

The novelty wore off pretty quickly

but she was very happy with the finished result (lipstick already needs touching up!)

And here’s a sneak preview of her ballet costume…

In other news I’ve also joined the Through the Lens - Digital Photography 101 Group, conducted by Hallie at The Rubber Room. This is exactly what I need right now - a bit of guidance and a little push to get me using the manual settings on my camera, and hopefully some tips on what all the buttons and dials mean. It seems to be a pretty active group so I’m looking forward to learning lots of new tricks from everyone.

The first assignment was to read the manual for your camera and take the best photo you could. I did actually read the manual when I first bought the camera and even bought a guidebook to go with it, so I kind of remembered some of the terms, but because I hadn’t put each thing into practice a lot of it was a jumble of confusing terms.

One type of photography situation I really want to work on is taking pictures when the lighting conditions aren’t perfect. When I can, I try to think about the time of day, the position of the sun etc, but the reality is that I often just pick up the camera to snap a few photos of the kids doing something interesting, so you can’t always plan each photo like a “session”.

Like today, for example where we were sitting in a room in someone’s house with the curtains drawn and the overhead light and a few lamps on. The Auto mode prompted the flash which made Guerita’s skin over-exposed and look even paler than it is, like in this photo.

I remember reading (not in the manual, on a blog I think) that in low light situations, where the automatic modes would prompt you to use the flash, it’s good to use the Av mode which lets the most amount of light in. Maybe someone will correct me here, because I know this is all related to shutter speed and the slower the speed, the more light comes into the lens, thus compensating for the lack of natural light and making up for the lack of flash. The result should look more natural than with a flash but when I’ve played around with this before the photos often still came out too dark.

Today while I sitting there for hours watching a parade of girls turning into painted dolls, I had a little play with the dials and discovered one I didn’t know was there! On my camera (Canon Rebel XTi) you move the top dial to Av mode, hold down the Av +/- button near the LCD screen and twiddling the little dial near the shoot button and you can adjust the aperture value up and down. Obviously I hadn’t read the manual that closely or I would have realised this earlier! By increasing the aperture value you decrease the shutter speed and let more light in. Here’s an example of 2 photos taken straight after each other with different aperture values (on my camera the first is at 0, the second at 2).

The data for these photos (and I still don’t understand all these numbers, but I’m learning) are:

Photo 1
Shutter speed: 1/80 sec
Aperture value: f/5.6
ISO: 1600
focal length: 55.0mm

Photo 2
Shutter speed: 1/50 sec
Aperture value: f/6.3
ISO: 1600
focal length: 55.0mm

I know the assignment said to take the best photo you can, and this obviously isn’t the best photo, but it’s going to be my entry for the first assignment, because it shows something I learnt about my camera, and I think that’s what the course is all about.

…I’d be tooting it right now! Except in a humble way of course, because I always feel awkward talking about recognition.

My theme customisation rated a mention today on the WP-Premiums - A Premium WordPress Theme Showcase site! You can see a whole lot of customised themes over there, rate your favourite and see the most popular.

If you felt like, you could go over there and rate my site. Mind you, I have no idea what I would get out of it, other than a smile on my face!

Well, I already have a smile on my face. As they say at the Oscars “It’s just nice to be nominated!”

I just couldn’t help myself! I was planning to wait until we left Mexico to load the new theme, but everything was ready and I was so excited about it, that I just couldn’t wait. Plus once we’re travelling and back in Perth my Internet access might be a bit sketchy so I didn’t want to load it up and then disappear. For now, my header says “almost back home”, but pretty soon, it’ll change to “now back home”.

So, let me show you around the new look Roaming Aussie Mum…

(if you’re reading this in a RSS reader, click on over. Go on!)

First things first - the theme I am using is the Thesis Theme by DIY Themes. This is actually a premium WordPress Theme (meaning I paid for it) and its the first time I’ve ever used a paid theme. I could never see the point before since there are so many free themes out there, but as soon as I saw this theme I fell in love with it and you get so much more than just a theme with this one.

It was developed by Chris Pearson of Pearsonified, whose blog I already read. His blog has great articles on customising themes, WordPress and blogging in general. You’ve probably all seen one of his other themes before, since his Cutline theme is one of the most popular themes out there. He’s also responsible for the Neoclassical, Copyblogger and Pressrow themes. I don’t fully understand all the ins-and-outs of SEO and theme structure, but Chris’ themes are certainly easy to use and beautifully presented.

Probably the most impressive thing about the Thesis Theme, is the support that comes with it. There’s a blog, with articles about how to use the theme, a user manual, and a forum where thesis users can get help with customisation, troubleshooting and just sharing ideas and inspiration for using the theme. The theme author is a regular contributor to the forums and not only have I got help over there from him, but I also discovered new blogs to haunt. Here’s a few I found through the forum (great blogs and great examples of ways to customise this theme):

Scribbles and Words
Wild Keys
Simple Mom
The Blissful Pixel

As well as all this support, when you buy this theme, you are then entitled to all the upgrades to the theme, for free. So every time Chris adds a new feature or fixes a bug, and releases a new version, you can upgrade easily.

Ok, so that’s my plug for this amazing theme. I love it, and I hope you do too. To find your way around, here’s a couple of things to notice:

• the pictures in the big image box at the top right are rotating so you’ll see a different one every time you visit or click to another page. These are some of my favourite photos an I’ll be adding to them as time goes on.
• Up the top left you’ll find tabs to various pages for my blog - most of which were already there, but one new addition - the Design page which sets out all the tweaking I have done to this theme, and to my previous theme.
• Underneath are a few more of my favourite photos (because I can’t help but put photos of my kids everywhere!). I’m using the Photoxhibit plugin for this but it still needs a little tweaking. When used in a post the plugin will open the photos in a lightbox, but in my sidebar it doesn’t want to do that. Bear with me while I sort that little glitch out.
• There’s a new blue box of text in the first sidebar, with a welcome message - click anywhere on that to go to the about page

For those of you who followed my previous post on getting ready for my new theme, some of the points there might make more sense now - like my custom background, made in Photoshop with a pattern using a “lace” brush, and my header image using a few swirly and heart brushes and fancy text. The little heart swirl is also my new favicon - the tiny image you see on your browser tab when my site is open, and also now in Google Reader in Firefox if you have the Better GReader add/on installed! Check out the design page for information on how to make one of those.

I’ve got my fingers crossed that it all goes smoothly with the new theme. One of the plugins I used to make sure everything would look right is the excellent Theme Test Drive Plugin. This lets you activate a ” test drive” of your desired theme that only you (the logged in administrator) can see. It’s fantastic for trying out new looks and I used it constantly to make sure all my little tweaks came out the way I wanted to. The only problem I found with this method was that moving widgets around in my sidebars when it was activated caused the sidebars to wig out. I suspect this had something to do with going from 3 widgetised sidebars to 2, but in any event, I would be wary of making “structural” changes while you’re in test drive mode. I found I wanted to move a lot of things around for the new theme and doing this even in test drive mode would also change things in my existing theme, so I also used a spare test blog to try out all sorts of fun and crazy stuff to see how it looked. Even if you don’t happen to have a spare domain name lying around (because I know you’re not all as crazy as me), you could probably test it out on a subdomain - something like www.subdomain.yourdomainname.com, if you are able to have another installation of WordPress on a subdomain (not sure about all that - check with your host!).

Other than that, everything else should be pretty straight forward. I’d love to hear what you think, and if you come across any problems or glitches or something just doesn’t seem to display right, please let me know!