Guerita has been going to ballet classes for a year now. It’s very much “the done thing” here in Mexico for girls to go to ballet. For boys I think the norm is tai kwon do or perhaps baseball when they’re older. We tried out a few ballet schools before finding one we liked - a “Baby Ballet” class that wasn’t too serious or technical - she was only 4 when she started after all, it’s not like we were looking to start her on her ballet career or anything.

I was a little surprised when early on in the year, I got (nicely) “told off” for not putting her hair in a proper bun for the classes (complete with hair net and headband to keep her hair out of her face). Apparently the kids take the whole thing more seriously when they are dressed the part. Parents are not allowed to watch the classes, except at the designated demonstration classes, because it is too distracting for the kids and they can’t concentrate on learning ballet. This takes half the fun out of it for me - being able to giggle at the kids running around the room pretending to be ballerinas. And I can’t say I’m particularly worried about her taking ballet “seriously”! Anyway, despite these few little quirks, we are happy with the ballet school - Guerita loves it and the teachers are very nice.

Next week they have their end of year concert - not surprisingly a very involved affair with professionally made costumes, rehearsals and the like. No doubt it will be one of those kids’ concerts where for the 5 minutes your child is on stage you are in raptures and the rest of it you’re trying not to yawn. The school teaches Jazz, Tap and Hip Hop as well as ballet so it could be pretty tedious.

2 days before the concert, though, they all have a professional portrait (photo) session, individually and as a class. They have to be in full costume, hair done just so and with full stage make-up on! I am terrified at the thought of having to do Guerita’s make-up to a professional stage standard. I barely wear make-up myself, let alone know how to do proper stage make-up.

The school has provided us with instructions - they must wear very dark brown eyeshadow, eyeliner and mascara. They must have pink or red blush and bright red lipstick. I don’t even own red lipstick! I might have to go with one of my muted pinks, I think. Obviously, the colour scheme is designed with the olive skin, brown hair and brown eyed colouring of every other student, which is understandable, but it could look a bit strange on my pale little blue-eyed, blonde haired girl.

I will not be at all surprised if the teachers have to do a fix-up job when we get there!

And you know I’m going to be taking photos to show you how it turned out.

I have been meaning to right a post about task management for ages now. A while ago I posted about getting my emails organised and always intended to follow it up with a to-do list post. Well, with the amount of things I had on my to-do list, posting about it kept getting put off, and life got in the way. But I have actually been testing out a few options for keeping on top of my tasks, so I thought I’d give you a run down of a few of them.

Now, obviously, if you prefer, you could use a simple pen and paper, there’s really no need for fancy gadgets or software, but I do like to organise these things on the computer - partly because I am a gadget geek, but also because the ease of updating (and keeping things neat) appeals to me. Many of the online and desktop tools I’ve found have other functions that can make getting and staying organised much easier, so if you like to be “electronically” organised, you might like to try them out.

Microsoft Outlook

I’ve noticed a lot of people spend a lot of time complaining about Microsoft products which I have to admit annoys me sometimes. To be honest there are a lot of computer snobs out there, and I don’t really buy into that philosophy. Yes, there are some products, like Firefox that I find to be better than the Microsoft version (Internet Explorer), but I don’t subscribe to the “everything Microsoft is crap and you’re stupid if you don’t believe me!” camp.

As I said in my email organisation post, I use Outlook and have done for a long time. Regardless of how you feel about Outlook, chances are if you work in an office, you’ll be expected to use Outlook and its probably a pretty common product for most (PC at least) users to use.

One of the reasons I like Outlook is that you can manage a lot of different things from the one place - email, contacts, calendar and tasks. There are also a lot of hidden functions that once you start playing around with you can make work for you. For example I always start up Outlook with the “Outlook Today” page which gives me a snapshot of upcoming appointments, tasks and email. This works quite well, but I would love to see a drag and drop gadget style “home page” for Outlook, along the lines of iGoogle, with lots of options for customisation for displaying only the information you want. I have seen a few tutorials for building your own Outlook Today page, but I haven’t had a lot of success with these (I think my HTML knowledge needs a bit of work for that).

I also like seeing my tasks in calendar display and there are a number of different views in Outlook to allow you to do this.

This view is activated by default when you are looking at the Day or Week View of your calendar, but you can also adjust it through View>Daily Task List.

It is also very easy to turn an email into a task or a task into an appointment or any other type of item in Outlook - simply by dragging and dropping it into the heading on the left taskbar (in my image above - see Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks at the bottom left). I use this frequently when I receive an email containing a task I have to do - just drag it to tasks and a pop-up box comes up allowing you to put in due date and other information.

So I like using Outlook. It’s familiar and useful and has a lot of functionality. The disadvantage of Outlook, however, is that you are tied to a particular computer to use it. If you regularly switch computers and would prefer an online solution, then Outlook probably doesn’t meet your needs.

Remember the Milk

Remember the Milk (RTM) is an online task management tool, developed by Aussies, so I I like the idea of supporting it. It has a lot of useful features and can be used in conjunction with Gmail, which brings Gmail slightly closer to offering all the features of an all-in-one manager. RTM is a fairly simple task management tool, which allows you to enter and track tasks from any computer.

I had planned to give you a review of Remember the Milk, but I’m currently having trouble logging in (some problem with a desktop shortcut keeps logging me out). These are the features the website lists:

• Managing tasks easily and quickly with intuitive interface
• Receive reminders via email, SMS and instant messenger
• Create as many lists as you like and organise them how you like using tags and notes
• Give your tasks a geographical location and see them on google maps
• Share send and publish tasks and lists with you contacts
• Add tasks by email even if you’re not logged into RTM
• Access RTM on your phone
• See tasks grouped by today, tomorrow and overdue. Set up recurring tasks
• Search tasks with Advanced search

So the things I like about RTM are that it is simple to use and allows hierachical task lists - ie a top level task (list) with lots of “sub-tasks” within each list so you can group your tasks effectively, it integrates with gmail and igoogle, google calendar, twitter, iphone and blackberry.

I was going to say that I didn’t like the fact that you couldn’t see your tasks in calendar format, but I just noticed the link-up with Google Calendar which allows you to see your RTM tasks in your Google Calendar and plan your time.

Lifetick

This last tool is actually the one I am using the most at the moment. It’s a new player on the market and is also developed by Aussies. Lifetick has a lot of the good features of RTM including hierachical task lists - it starts with “Core Values” (your top level groups). Within each Core Value you can add Goals, and then within each goal add tasks. The interface is slick and easy to use and if you’re a very visual person, you’ll like this tool - there are a number of different views for your tasks, including pie charts, lists, various widgets and a journal.

I really like the way tasks are organised in this tool and have found it not only helps me keep track of tasks, but helps me organise in my head the things I have to acheive using the Core Values and Goals.

For example, my Core Values are the big things in my life I need to work on - Kids, Travel, House, Blog and a few others. Within the Blog Core Value I have goals of “Re-design Roaming Aussie Mum” for all the tasks to implement my new theme, “Blog Maintenance” for all the ongoing tasks, and “Aussie Bloggers” for the guest posting and things I have to do as a moderator of the forum at Aussie Bloggers.

The Status page also allows you to drag and drop widgets to display different information about your tasks, such as Next 10 due tasks (from all goals), Overdue Tasks

Lifetick is free with limited functionality (limit of 4 goals and no access to status and journal), but it didn’t take me long to decide that I wanted the full version which only costs USD$20 (AUD$22) for a year.

So, how about you? How do you manage your to-do list?

Today was Guerita’s last day of school, also the last day of the school year, so there was lots of excitement around the playground, from kids and teachers alike. The teacher asked me if I’d like to come in early to the class as they had planned a farewell party for Guerita. We’re really going to miss this school. Even though they do things a little differently here, the teachers and staff are so caring and kind and thoughtful and it seems they have a real soft spot for Guerita (and she for them). She’s always been the one that stands out, given her blonde hair and us being pretty much the only Australians in town, so I guess that’s part of it. (I suspect adjusting to being “one of the crowd” back home might take a bit of getting used for her.)

The day’s activities were pretty low-key - some games, a cake and playtime in the playground. It’s been pretty hot here lately (over 40C every day) so the kids didn’t last long outside before they were worn out. Chiq and I turned up just as they were about to retreat back to the comfort of the air-conditioned classroom.

The kids were pretty excited and everyone danced around the room for the rest of the party, plus posed for photos for me

Chiq even tried to get a spot of IT training while she was there…

The teachers presented Guerita with a book the class had made specially for her - each child had drawn a picture of themself and they made a cover with a map of Mexico and of Australia. They also had made a DVD photo slideshow with loads of photos of Guerita with her school friends and teachers, taken throughout the year. It was so sweet, it brought a tear to my eye; that they had gone to so much effort for her. We will certainly never forget how lovely this little school was, and how much she enjoyed her time here. This will always be her first school, with lots of great memories.

As much as we’re looking forward to going home, we’re still a little sad to say

¡Adios Pre-escolar!

Were you one of the over 8 million people who downloaded Firefox 3 on Tuesday to help them break the World Record for most software downloads in a 24 hour period?

I’m not going to tell you you’re a dud if you’re still using Internet Explorer (there’s enough people saying that around the web), but I will say that I only switched to Firefox in the last few months and I’ve never looked back. It is faster, websites look better and it has heaps of in-built features and add-ons that make surfing the net much easier and more fun!

Kate commented on my Blog Re-design post the other day about how useful the Web Developer’s add-on in Firefox is for trying out colours and playing around with different tweaks in CSS. As soon as I read her comment, I realised I had left out an essential tool that I use all the time to work out how to change things in CSS. I haven’t really explored all that the Web Developer’s add-on can do, but I do use Firebug regularly to play around with CSS and to have a squizz at how other people have achieved the look they have on their blog.

Firebug displays the html, css and script of any website you are browsing. If you hover over the 6 digit code for a colour a little swatch pops up to show you which colour the code is for. the most useful feature of it that I find is that you can edit the css in firebug to give you a preview of how your changes will look. This little trick has gone a LONG way to helping me understand how CSS works because instead of taking a stab in the dark when editing the stylesheet and re-loading the page to see if the changes turned out the way you wanted, you can make changes in Firebug and see them instantly reflected on the webpage. If you are at all interested in learning about CSS, in my opinion, Firebug and Web Developers are the first things you should download.

In the spirit of all things Firefox, since they’ve just been setting world records and such, I thought I’d list the add-ons that I currently use and tell you which ones I love! I’m not going to link to all of them, because they can all be downloaded from the central depository at Firefox’s Add-on Site (and its even easier to find them with Firefox 3 - direct from your Tools menu).

• All-in-One Sidebar - puts your downloads, add-ons, bookmarks etc in a tabbed sidebar, making them all a bit more accessible
• Better Gmail 2 - adds features and skins to your Gmail
• Better Greader - same thing for Google Reader
• Colorzilla - this is another useful tool for playing with colour - an eyedropper that you can hover over any colour you see in your browser to find out the 6 digit and RGB value
• English (Australian) Dictionary - so it recognises “colour” and “favourite”!
• Firebug
• Fireshot - for taking screenshots (I actually use the Snipping Tool in Windows Vista for this, but if you’re not on that platform, then this works well)
• Foxmarks Bookmark Synchroniser - I use a desktop and a laptop so this is an awesome tool - it keeps my bookmarks up to date on both machines
• Measure-it - drag and select any area in your browser to see its size in pixels - another useful blog tweaking tool
• Read it Later - I’ve only just installed this so I haven’t fully explored it yet, but with it you can save an offline version of a webpage to look at later

I do have a few more installed, but I don’t really use them, so can’t comment on their benefit.

So, tell me, do you use Firefox? What add-ons do you love and can I not live without!

It’s probably not surprising that my current circumstances have led to a fair bit of soul-searching. I’ve been thinking a lot about the type of person I am, the type of person my husband is (as opposed to what I thought he was) and to the type of people I want my children to become. I’ve also been thinking about how all this will change all of us, probably in different ways.

The other day I was helping Guerita with her homework. She was getting frustrated because she couldn’t do it easily. She didn’t want to keep working at it because it was too hard (I actually think it was too hard for a 5 year old but that’s a whole other post). We had a long talk about trying our best and not giving up when things got hard. Of course, we were just talking about homework, but for me there was certainly a bigger message there and I realised that this is one of those things I will probably hammer home emphasise with my kids in years to come.

I know that I am a persistent and determined person. At times, you could call me stubborn (many have), but I like to cast it in a positive light, so I am going with persistent. Which is another thing I know about me. I am glass half full kind of person; an optimist, I guess. I tend to try to see things in a positive light and not dwell too much on the negatives. What this means is that when I want to do something, I am confident there’ll be a way to achieve my goal, even when there’s obstacles in my way, and I don’t give up when the going gets a bit rough.

One of the (many) reasons I find my husband’s behaviour so difficult to accept is that he apparently isn’t so persistent. Apparently, when things get a little tough, its easier for him to give up. I don’t think any marriage is ever perfect or that we can be blissfully happy all the time. We all have our ups and downs but apparently I was alone in thinking we should work through the more difficult periods, that we had a responsibility to ourselves and to our kids to do everything we possibly could to keep our family together. He might not see it this way, but I’ve made it pretty clear to him that I think his method of dealing with our situation was a cowardly and selfish way out, and I don’t like what that says about him and about his ability to stick with something when things get a little bit tough. I spent the first few weeks after this bombshell saying everything I could think of to convince him to try and work things out. As difficult as it would be to overcome the obstacle of his betrayal, I didn’t want to give up. I felt we owed to the kids, to each other to try as hard as we could.

So, going through this process had made me so acutely aware of the messages I want my kids to learn, the values I want them to grow up with. I hardly need to say that one of the things that scares me the most is that my children will grow up with a warped view of marriage; that they’ll grow up thinking that when things are hard, it’s OK just to give up. I know now that I’ll have to work extra hard to instil the values of loyalty and determination in them. It breaks my heart that they might look back on their parents’ marriages and think “they didn’t try hard enough”.

Maybe, knowing how stubborn persistent I am, that is why I find it so hard to believe that after all we’ve experienced together that it can be so easy to throw it away. In my eyes, a refusal to TRY is a worse betrayal than anything else he has done. The last thing I said to him last night was “I just hope you don’t give up on your children as easily as you gave up on me.”

[Can I just say at the end here, that there is obviously a lot more to this situation than I've revealed here. It's a really difficult thing to do, to share the details of such a painful situation so publicly and I still grapple on every post with how much to say and leave out. I'm conscious that the details of my messy life might make you uncomfortable, so I completely understand if you don't want to read all about it. I also completely understand if you're curious about things I haven't said and trust me, I will not be offended if you want to ask questions about it. I may choose to answer them privately by email, or not to answer them just yet, but I really don't mind if you ask. I guess they will mostly all come out eventually on the blog, perhaps in a trickle, perhaps in a gush if I'm feeling particularly raw that day. Who knows?]