LA Fitness

so i bit the bullet and did it, just like i said i would. and you know what? i do NOT like to spin!! who knew, well i kindof thought i might not like it, but there ya go, you have to try everything at least once (in spinning apparently it takes 3 times to really find out how much you hate having bruised lady bits!) so the delish Kt and i made it to the gym with minutes to spare, not a good start! everyone had been sneaky and gotten to the class a little earlier and had bagged all the good bikes, i mean good when i say the ones at the bottom of the class!! Kt and i were stuck right up the front, the instructor took us through the bike and on we hopped and got to warming up. let me tell you it was a tough 45 minutes. there were times i thought i would puke, times i thought i would fall off the damn thing and then others when i was sure i was going to pass out! but i made it... and then it turns out that our seats were incorrectly positioned, no wonder it was that extra bit uncomfortable (yeah i realise the class is no walk in the park but its nice to have something to blame!) when we were done, there was a bit of euphoria i must admit, then some serious wobbling down the stairs! but my head was in my arse cos i left my trainers in the gym, and now they are gone forever, luckily i was thinking of getting new ones anyway so its not that big a deal, just a push to take the finger out and take care of it. this morning i fell out of bed and into more gym gear, was suprised how well i could move etc, but the lady bits... my! well they were sore! but we rocked out this morning on the machines and had a bit of a laugh, bit of a sweat etc.. going to go to Body Pump tonight (im scared) and then salsa with the girls... i might be a wreck tomo!! might be?... defo will be!!

the road to Prague

ok do i have finally done it! i have joined a freaking gym.... i might have been paying membership to blasted curves for years and never gone but this is a real gym with machines to play on and its close to work so i can go in the mornings and still have time to have a leisurely shower and walk into work (yes people i am walking from now on!) i think i will be saving the moola on the car and giving the fat the heave ho! as prague draws closer i am getting the fear... the fear is not my friend, it is my motivator, i will no longer hide underneath my duvet until 8.15 in the morning and roll (literally somtimes) out of the bed and into the clothes a i find and then stumble through the house into the car to get to work. now i will be a reformed couch potatoe, i will be up at 7.15 to get to the gym for 7.30, do an hour in the gym, be it a class or some weights or the dreaded cardio..then hit the showers and meander to work and enjoy a healthy brekkie of porridge (that nukable stuff cant be good for you but it tastes yummy!) i mean i am already making my food for lunch at home, this cant be too hard... although i think trying to make a stirfry dish at 7 in the am might be my downfall so i really will have to be organised, not my best trait ;)

so im hitting my first class tonight, decided to jump into the deep end with a spinning class, i heard they hurt... ALOT... but nothing better for a wake up call, the guy who showed us around said he could do 20 minutes the first class he tried and he seemed like a fattie to me now so i have an inflated idea of what i should be able to do! oh dear! im going with the delish Kt from Tripod (although sssssssshhh its supposed to be a secret, she lives with a rake of men who would ridicule her for joining and are ridiculously competitive!)

the aim of this is to rid the body of the flab, try not to lose the boobies, and even harder, try not to become all 'strong' as my mother would say ;) watch this space!

keeping up with the Arnolds!

was looking through some of the blogs that im following and found myself disgruntled when people have not been updating for my enjoyment. then i thought about my recent posts and they have not been the most consistent so am going to make a concentrated effort to rectify that, although i dont think they are as much fun as they were when i was travelling....

so what has been going on in my life.. hmmm now i work for cartrawler (yawn tastic) and am busy feeling guilty for not working out enough for the prague adventure (but who wants to hear about that!) but a highlight of the past week was last night when i finally got to meet up with my mistress Mrs Arnold and have some dinner and catch the tail end of my bro's gig in sibean che on george's street... oh rebecca is this a plug for your brother's new band MoJo who play in sibean che every thursday>??? why yes it is! anyone who is in dublin and not sure what to do on a Thursday should get themselves a table in sibean che for some delish irish food and some great music. so i didnt realise it was a restaurant bar, so the idiot i am kelly and myself went and ate in CafeBarDeli 2 doors up from the place. oops. the starters were devine, mains boring and dessert.... yummy fool, which kelly had never had before (one of those things that never wuite got across the water) so we headed to see the bro afterwards and i plied the gorgeous kelly with wine at dinner, tequila in the bar in the hope of getting into her pants, but it was all in vain (that and i cant bring myself to be a lesbot.. no offence intended to all the vag lovers out there) was impressed with the place, the music and the general mood of the place, will be back there next week folks, come join me!

other than that shameless plug havent got alot going on this weekend. there might be a party i have to attend this evening, and im sure the outcome will provide many the amusing anecdotes in future posts....

but for now let me leave you with this thought.... head to george's street on a thursday to see my brother play!!!

The weekend that nearly killed me

if you had asked me a while ago whether i thought a 4 day weekend was a good idea the answer would have been a resounding YES! but the reality of the situation is quite different i discovered last weekend when i finally got my wish. so i was finished work last week on the wednesday, was i polite about it, nope! made everyone super I made everyone super jealous of the entire thing mwah ha ha ha! Or so I thought…. So that night I went to get Katy from the airport and along with wally, a very fragrant lemon curd pie and some empty wine bottles rolling around in the boot off we went to offaly. We passed through the mystery toll thing on the M50 and I didn’t realise until today when I got a fine! Shocking behaviour! Anyhoo onwards into the night I drove, and I don’t like to drive in the night by the way, I keep fantasising about death, wait that’s prob not the bestest description, I tend to visualise getting smushed into strawberry jam on the motorway at night, think it might have something to do with my car being made of paper.. anyway the girls kept me occupied on the way down and we rolled into camp headon about 1am. We crept into the house like mice, or so we thought, should’ve known better. The parents we still awake so greetings were shared and them we all rolled into bed in preparation for the wedding the next day.. OH YESS… the WEDDING, the whole reason I got time off last week. Finally Katie and Paul tied the knot (they have been together for 11 years only..) so the next morning I woke up about 9.30 and had a leisurely brekkie with the girls as my dad was painting the gate (how country) and then the beautification began… showers, and spray, face painting and hair problems followed. The wedding was black tie, so glamorous! I wore a lovely gold and black number from monsoon, katy was rocking a black strapless from monsoon and wally was all provocative with her rabbit fur shawl! Basically we looked HOT. Cue my dad arriving in from the farm still filthy and it being 10 minutes until the start of the ceremony! So I left them to it and we hightailed it to the church, they somehow were only minutes behind us tho! Odd! The ceremony was lovely, there were tears and giggles and many many photos. And then it was all over (well it took about 2 hours!) next stop durrow castle to check in and grab some nibbles. The food was delish, the speachs amusing and the cake divine. We danced until 2am and then everyone hightailed it to the bar. I found myself slipping so we ladies retired to our room to prepare for day 2. the partying continued until 7am!! I went for a run in the morning (yes I am a sap) and then managed to sleep for another 3 hours after breakfast, think I had too much redbull in my system from the night before! That evening saw us all getting dolled up again for a big party Birr style, with a bbq, dj Neil and many many drinks… I might have misbehaved a smigen but it wasn’t anything I needed to worry about. The fear did not come! The next morning suddenly it was all over before we realised it.

But no sleep for the wicked… it was into the car with me and wally and we hightailed it up to Dublin. I had a lacrosse tournament all weekend and I was a little late for the first match. But I made it, felt awful but managed to win both matches! Whilst I was sweating it out on the pitch the guys from England flew over for th Ireland England match. Now not to put a dampener on the blog post but a few weeks ago my friend Andy was diagnosed with terminal brain stem cancer. He has between 9months and 2 years left and is the most positive person I have ever known. He is a hero for anyone out there in the same position. He fully intends to break the record and live for a long time. But bareing in mind that this is real life and not a Disney movie he is taking the bull by the horns and doing everything (and prob everyone) he wants to. He organised a trip over with 5 mates for the match. They stayed at mine, and no matter how knackered I was I made sure that Andy was enjoying himself! So after the match I fell in the door and they guys all greeted me, from afar though cos I prob stank! Mix of booze and sweat is never good! After a quick shower and change it was out the door to searsons for the match. All was going well even though the guys wore their English jerseys… until one trollop from about 3 people in front chucked her half pint of beer back in their direction! She didn’t really get them though just Carla, Tom’s Irish girlfriend, yeah she wasn’t impressed at all… some people! When the match was over and the English suitably ridiculed for their heritage we headed home with some booze and order 12 pizzas for 10 people!!! Oh my god I have never seen so many pizza’s in my life! Brilliant! We gorged ourselves and stil the guys managed to get quite drunk, then it was off to the club with us…

The lacrosse people were headed that direction as well for the night out and what ensued was hazy for most people, mainly the girls who woke up with permenant marker on their arms and black eyes (apparently there was a late night throw about…) it was fun to swap stories with people the next day at the final day of games, oh yeah I went out to play more lax the next morning. The guys went to wander the city intending to see my play at some stage but that didn’t work out and im kindof glad it didn’t cos we didn’t play that well the next day.. we still won the competition though! And I stuck around until after the guys match to receive the trophy, I suppose that’s what you get for bein the captain, oh yeah im the Dub Lax ladies captain, random?! so that night i was supposed to go out with the lax people again and meet all the guys on the brighton team propely and perhaps swap some spit with one of them if he got lucky but when i got home and warmed up under a shower i realised that my body was on strike! it was all i could do to keep my eyes open that evening. luckily all the guys were knackered too so it was bed early and then people left at like 4.30 am for flights aaaaaaagh. needless to say im looking forward to this weekend and all the sleeping im going to be doing.... but wait... hark i hear the song of britney teasing me with her beats... perhaps i can sleep when im dead? ;)

World Cup

So I could go on and on abut what went down in India but frankly there are some things that you want to keep to yourself?! that and im feeling very lazy etc these days about this blog. its been a while and this always happens to me when im doing a diary etc, something i used to have when i was a teenager but was taught not to have it when all my family read it over and over again! but yeah if they didnt read it i would get bored of it soon enough and lose it or something. not very dedicated there am i! so here i am again blogging and this time with some great news! i have bee selected to play for ireland once more in the world cup this time! how awesome! the competition will be hosted in prague over 10 days in june from the 17th to the 27th, all are welcome to see how we get on. im very excited. although very scared about the amount of training i have to put in to make it worth it, i want to be so fit that i dont lose my breath out there... well if im not the first person gasping i will be happy! so there you have it folks.... world cup countdown has begun!

Palolem Nights

hey everyone,
im back and blacker although now im orange.. and a little faded... but i have had time to think about my adventures and experiences and now am putting them online. so where did i leave off, oh yeah, just about when we got to palolem.. it was an unfortunate ride with a taxi man who definitely was screwing us. but hugh paid for it up front so we went with it and it was worth missing the many many buses. so we arrived into this paradise of a beach that looks like the beach but bigger with more shacks. we immediately met some guy who brought us to his shacks. Jazz Emily and I took one and Hugh and Denis took the other. our hut was massive with shower made for many and a sexy pink mossie net and right next door to the guys. we spent the days on the beach and the nights rocking up to Cafe Del Mar the only place that stayed awake all night and served many drinks. but that was before the drama that created the series that we now know as Palolem Nights.... so Jazz introduced us to Dan and James. they were both obsessed with her and almost fell out over her! each night and day each would try for her attention.. nothing was exactly working out until the night that we bought the 'same same but different' tee shirts. that was the night i got talking with Lee. so that night dressed like ridiculous people jazz emily and i wore a crazy teeshirt and disgusting pants and danced like lunatics. Lee obviously liked it cos me and him went skinnydipping later that night, well he went skinny dipping, i just went for a dip, in my clothes! bless him. but after that the dress up bug had really and truely set in so the next night we all decided to have an 'Indian Bad Taste night' Jazz emily and I got ourselves some awful swimsuits that were baywatch high cut and we pranced about al night in them and thats when Jazz hooked up with James, I got Lee again and then Dam went crazy adn tried to smake James down but missed and ended up getting stitches!! And what about Uncle Simon, Richard and ofcourse the problem with Jazz losing her passport and getting stuck in India to this day?? well thats tomo's story... when the wine has worn off!
xx

Goan Adventures

hey peeps i know it has been an age since i last blogged and im sure the countless people who read this (yes you arnolds!) will be interetsed to know what has been going on in the time that has elapsed... well when i last spoke i was in anjuna all alone and being eaten alive by those pesky mosquitos.. they made sweet munching love to my ankles on both feet and were so itchy for ages until i came upon a medical store with a sleeping shop assistant who woke up and gave me special indian cream that cured me, no it wasnt instant cure but it was sweet heaven compared to what i was experienceing.. i mean 10 on each ankle in the space of a few hours, no fair!

so anjuna was quiet, im in palolem now. its beautiful here. but back to anjuna, first of all i decuided to stick around for the market, which itself was a huge dissappointment, i wanted to get loads of gifts but the prices were inflated for tourists and there wasnt anything special about it, lonely planet curse strikes again. i think that anything that has been in that book should be avoided by travellers! prices are always higher in real life and everyone has been there before so there is nothing to discover~ so there i was alone in anjuna hoping to meet people like everyone said they do... i clocked this pair of girls walking tiredly acrosse the beach on my second day and they spoke english!! so i kept an eye out for them and luckily they came back and i followed them (stalket i know) into my guesthouse, i started to talk to them and then directed them to the pkace that i was staying. they only had one room left so i let emily stay in with me, ultimate act of faith i know but it all worked out in the end. so that night i met jazz and emily who were travelling on their gap year, uh oh, teenagers, but they seemed pretty chilled, hung over and generally my kind of people and with them was evan jazz's holiday romance that she hooked up with in kerala on the houseboat, how romantic?! so that night we tried to find some form of a party but the place was dead and jazz and emily were not impressed with anjuna, so after dinner and some sheesha (flavoured tobacco) we all headed dejected back to the guesthouse and just went to bed. they decided to head north the next day so my new friends were gone and i was alone again :( but this did not last long, that evening i met bommer and marni this lovely couple who were at the end of their india trip and we spent a lovely evening chatting about everything and i got the distinct impression that they needed someone new to talk to.. couples travelling together must be tough! i tell you if the couple is on the rocks travelling in india will break them! so the next day i was back to square one but not really bothered about it.. i found a place that did movies an headed there for a quiet night, this is where i bumped into grant and shawn, 2 americans who were travelling together. grant is a dancer (and not gay i think) and shawn is indian american whose family are trying to set up a marriage for him shortly! so we hung out for the evening and i didnt think i would see them again even though i told them where i would be on the beach etc, we didnt exchange numbers, i dont know mine off by heart... so the next day i didnt see them although i kept an eye out but nothing. wasnt too bothered again, headed for another movie the night after and bumped into grant there, he said he had been on the beach looking for me but was not successful... yeah right, but i let him away with it cos he was damn cute!he invited me to dinner and then drove us both on his scooter to this super rosemantic place called sublime.. there were even freaking flower petals on the table and we were tucked away in a little nook under the stars, the restaurant was open air in the jungle! we talked freely and he seemed to good to be true, a little too nice american if you catch my drift, poor boy, i probably shocked him more times than i can count! and then the thunder and lightening started... how cool i thought but he was worried about getting struck or something so we made to leave and i was laughing as the rain came spitting, it was pityful i said, this is not rain.. i was to eat my words a little while later when he dropped me off at my bike, neither of us wanted the night to end so we chatted for a bit more and thenthe heavens opened.... i was wearing contacts so i had to pause under a tree and we talked some more, even though i was in a white tee his eys didnt dfirt once, fair play to him... or was he gay.. but no second "date" was organised or anything but he did say he would see me on the beach, but this was not to be and i havent see him since... sob sob... nah it was a perfect night of fantasy.. although the fantasy would have ended a little more dramatically than me saying... i bet you'll not make it to the beach tomo.. have a nice life!!

so that was that... then it was market day!!! jazz and emily contacted me to say they were day tripping down and we met on the beach and meandered about the market. as i said above it was not that impressive! but afterwards we had dinner and then it occured tome... hey guys when is your bus.. they said 8.30 ,... it was already 9pm! so they were staying at mine then! thus ensued a lot of drinking, dancing to our own beat, jumping over the bonfire on the beach and talking about men waaaay too much. so we made it back to the guest house to dump our stuff and drunkenly the 3 of us jumped on to my moped and weaved our way to the club.. we danced the night away for about 3 hours to crappy musice but with an entry of about 1.50 euros and all drinks were free what could we do.. about 3 am i was done and rounded up the girls to start the way home, it wasnt far infact we could have walked but i had the bike and on we jumped. jazz and i came to teh same conclusion at this point... that driving topless would be better so off we bounced naked from the waist up... unfortunately people were still awake and im surprise dwe didnt get done for indiecent exposure... best bit of that night.. jazz asking me... em becks.. should i "cup you" when we saw people on the road!!

the adventures of jazz and emily continue, they came back to anjuna once more to pick me up to head to palolem but first we had to find this rave... so the night started with me deciding not to drink and scoot and off we went to 9 bar in vagator.. this little rave scene was random as hell as it ended at 10pm.. on the dot i might add. bumped into aisling from sharjah! random... the world is tiny! then we started the quest to westend where the party wass. first to the bank link, i left the bike in jazz's hands and off i trotted when i got back she was traumatised cos some indian had arrive dnad kissed her shoulder etc, whilst she was telilng me this she dropped the bike on her leg and the exhaust burned her proper! she decied to soilder on... we finally made it to the rave about an hour later, we got lost many time etc but were pround that we made it. but it was such a let down. i have been to better ones in dublin! the music sucked and the indians kept getting too close, so about 2 hours in we were done and headed home, only to get stopped by the cops... uh oh... there were 3 of us on the bike (not allowed ) none had licenses (uh oh) so they fined us 1100 rupees... but eveything in india is negoitable so after some wide eyes and useing our feminine ways we paid him 500 rupees and were off again! it was some night...
the next day we were off to palolem, it is paradise here but the adventure continus... what about our room that smells like sewage? or the fact that our one and only night out so far resulted in my flip flops getting nicked adn jazz loosing her passport and traveller cheques and all her money?! this place is alot more busy than anjuna but not at the same time.. its absolutely beautiful and i think im goin to stay here until i leave for hom on the 19th ... (7days!)

so peeps expect more random stories soon, hanging out with jazz and emily has mad life a little more dangerous! they are leaving on tuesday though, but if jazz cant get her hands on some doc about the passport she might not be allowed home, oh yeah and she is only reporting it now, it happened about a 4 days ago! i was more mad about my shoes than she was bothered about her passport.. damn hippys i tells ya!
much love xxx