And no one is perfect, right? And all these perfect blogs are BORING, right? So here I am, my job being to ‘make your life beautiful’ but like all normal people, sometimes I just don’t feel like that!

I try not to take it out on others… Except for Steve at the Volvo dealership who I made apologise to me because he was rude. Yes, well he was. Anyway, my friends are now making fun of me and going around chirping ‘Steve who???!!!’, which is what I demanded of poor Steve’s workmate, when I asked him ‘what is that rude man’s name?’ The man said ‘Steve.’ I said “Steve WHO?’

Soooo, how to make me smile a bit today… Hmmm. How about this book I found.

It’s called How to Sue Everyone, Ready-To-Use Legal Letters to Terrorize Friends and Family. It made me smile, well only a little bit because I am working on being crumply, you see.

This book is full of ready-to-complete faux legal forms that you can ’serve’ to anybody who dares to annoy you.

Your kids come home after curfew? Serve them with an official notice putting them up for adoption. Boyfriend has b.o.? Make him fill out a Personal Hygiene Pledge Card, if that doesn’t work it may be time for a Notice of Dismissal. No food on the table? Absence of Food Report. Gedditt?

Well it made me laugh in that I-feel-evil-today-kinda-way.

Oh! What’s happening to me! A little creepy-crawley smile has appeared across my face.

Looking out the window this morning, to find out that someone has stolen all the snow overnight, makes me think at first that maybe Caroline turned up the heat a little too far. :-)

We have this regular see-saw situation at Fabiola & Sing Sing where we disagree about how hot the heating should be. I guess I’ve become acclimatised to cooler conditions through decades of working around air-conditioned computers and years of having most of the duvet pulled off my sleeping body (Hey! Watch it! – Ed)

So I’ll turn the temperature down a little and – when I’m not looking (or rather more accurately, she doesn’t care if I’m looking or not) – Caroline will turn it back up a degree or two.

We don’t go crazy in either direction – after all, it would be daft to be shivering in the house under three puffa jackets, and similarly Caroline is the more environmentally-friendly one of the two of us, always reminding me to recycle tin cans, cardboard and glass bottles.

And maybe she’s onto something. Maybe there’s something especially magical about snow and the winter, specifically because we’re indoors in the warm looking out to the cold vista. The snow seems to fall so much less than it used to these days (according to the media, Britain was hit by its biggest snowfall since 1991), making it more unusual, making it more of an event. And it reignites the child inside all of us to go and have fun.

Fun isn’t about being cold or wet or miserable, but about adventure and doing something different, with the comfort of knowing a warm duvet and a hot cup of chocolate isn’t too far away.

So there were reports of policemen throwing snowballs at each other, and scores of adults pulling kids on makeshift sledges (I heard of one man using an old suitcase!) up wintry slopes, and even skiing on Parliament Hill.

Life is short, and we should all do everything we can to make it fantastic. A flurry of snow should remind all of us that it’s not about the 9-5 grind and keeping up with mortgage payments, but about enjoying life to the full.

Lets hope those feelings remain long after the snow has disappeared from everyone’s front garden…

Happy new year everybody!

We’re saying goodbye to 2008 with a spell of chilly cold weather and the crunching sound of frost beneath our feet.

Although I’m the first to enjoy a party, New Year’s Eve has always been a bitter-sweet celebration for me. It’s always a shock to think “Eeek! Another year gone!” and I believe I might be allergic to the sound of poorly sung choruses of “Auld Lang Syne”.

What is it with that weird handshake thing that happens when you sing “Auld Lang Syne” anyway? Who dreamt that one up and thought it was a good idea?

And then there is the knowledge that at midnight I will always find some snaggle-toothed lecherous 90-year-old puckering up to get a smooch from me… do I give off some kind of magnetic attraction to this kind of man?

Oh well, I suppose it’s only for one night – and being around friends and family is something never to turn your nose up at. And in the midst of a cold winter anything that can be done to have a celebration gets the thumbs-up from me.

If you’re depressed thinking that the holiday is almost over, and soon life will be back to normal with work and the regular nine-to-five then pick yourself up with something beautiful for your house and garden in the Fabiola & Sing Sing Winter Sale.

Our pre-Christmas party (thanks to everyone who showed up!) was a great success, and so we’re continuing the fun by continuing to offer all of our beautiful products at 15% off, but we can’t keep our prices at this level for ever!

Wordle is a fun little web app that will take a selection of words or a blog’s RSS feed and convert it into an (often beautiful) word cloud. It can be quite mesmerising to play with it.

Naturally, I couldn’t resist plugging Fabiola & Sing Sing into Wordle, and lo-and-behold it came up with a seasonal Christmas stocking of a word cloud. As you can see, words appear larger the more often they appear in our blog.

Anyway, this got me thinking. If you can create a Wordle word cloud with the contents of a blog, or just with a paragraph or two of text, you could just as easily create a homemade personal Christmas card with it.

All you would need to do is enter some of the keywords that you want to share with family and friends (maybe the names of your family members, your pet cat, and Christmas-y words like holly, mistletoe, Santa Claus, stockings, and stuffed turkey) and Bob’s your uncle.

So, go on, get creative with Wordle.

Thank you to to all of you who have encouraged and supported us at Fabiola & Sing Sing, while we have grown into something to be proud of.

Many of you gave us wonderful feedback, especially regarding our website, while we ironed out the creases. It’s looking a little less crumpled and we are so excited that we decided to throw a party!

The Grand Opening of the Fabiola & Sing Sing website will take place in Oxford, UK, next Tuesday, 16th December 5-10pm.

Celebrate with us and enjoy a 15% discount on every item in our shop, as well as complimentary pink champagne and Christmas Caipirinha cocktails!

Email us if you would like to come and celebrate with us, and help us get through the champagne and cocktails!

Oh, and I nearly forgot. As a special early Christmas present to our faithful blog readers – you can take advantage of a 15% discount of all the products in the Fabiola & Sing Sing online store by using web code WEB1208 at the checkout. This special promotion is running until December 20th – so don’t delay!

Looking forward to seeing you! Merry Christmas!

It’s time for us to stand up and be counted!

A week or so ago I blogged about how you and your children could make a turkey out of Lego (or indeed, other animals, dinosaurs or monsters) to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s a fun, creative way to spend the cold rainy days at the end of November.

At the same time I grumbled about Britain not celebrating Thanksgiving like our American and Canadian cousins, and maybe we should petition Gordon Brown to call for a British holiday in the same vein.

Well, guess what? Fabiola & Sing Sing has started an official petition to that effect on the 10 Downing Street website.

If you agree that it would be a good thing to have a national holiday on the fourth Thursday of November, and it would help break up the drag of dark nights before Bonfire night and Christmas, sign the petition! This cause needs your support.

To get you in the mood, here is what I wrote on the Downing Street website to give my (very convincing) case for a British Thanksgiving holiday:

The American people celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November, at the end of the harvest season.

It is a national holiday to express thanks for one’s material and spiritual possessions. It’s also a great excuse for a party with friends and family, in a month which is notoriously dreary, gloomy and dark.

Seeing as you’ve changed the clocks to make it dark earlier in the evening – couldn’t we do with something to look forward to in that long gap between Bonfire Night and Christmas Day?

Come on Gordon! Make a stand! Give us a special Thanksgiving day on the same day as the USA, and we can cement our “special friendship” with our American cousins by joining them in a non-religious celebration of all the good things in life and Turkey sandwiches.

And don’t worry that it seems like ages until next Thanksgiving – this petition is open until December 2009.

This blog is fairly new, and I must admit I’m pretty new to blogging too. I have sometimes wondered what people might be able to ascertain from my personality based upon what I blog about – well now, because of a new website, I know!

Typealyzer analyses your blog (or indeed anyone else’s) and tries to work out what their personality type is as a result of what it finds.

I imagine it does all kinds of jiggerypokery and advanced lexicographical analysis before burping out its assessment. I’m not sure how much weight we should put in it, but it’s all a bit of fun, so I couldn’t resist entering Fabiola & Sing Sing’s blog address to see what it came up with.

And here’s what it said:

ESFP – The Performers

The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colours and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead – they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.

Soft fabrics, bright colours, sweet smells..

Hmm.. sounds pretty accurate to me!

It’s three weeks until Christmas, but we can’t just stop ourselves from giving you an early present.

Yes, fresh from us introducing a Twitter feed where you can follow Fabiola & Sing Sing’s every thought, we’ve also set up our very own fan page on Facebook.

Yes, we know it’s rather self-indulgent to set up a fan page for our own company, but if it’s good enough for Martha Stewart and Kylie it’s good enough for us! It’s a place where you can find the latest news about us, and meet other like-minded shoppers.

Who knows, in time maybe we’ll post some photographs, videos and the odd special offer up there too?

So, if you’re at a loose end in front of the computer – join us on Facebook!

Ooer.. How funky are we? Check us out!

Yes, Fabiola & Sing Sing has jumped even further onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon by embracing Twitter.

You can now follow our blog entries and activities as-they-happen via our regular Tweets at http://www.twitter.com/fabiolasingsing.

And don’t forget that you can easily subscribe to our RSS feed – either directly or via one of the many links in the sidebar which allow you to add our latest blog entries to your home page or RSS reader.

As well as a new colour scheme and design (that aubergine coloured stripe is a favourite of mine), we’re also taking the opportunity to refresh a number of items in the online store – there are some great new products and finds from all corners of the earth, so be sure to check them all out.

The website refresh isn’t quite complete yet – but give it a few days and we should be there with fully updated product lines and descriptions.  Of course, it’s possible that a few gremlins may have crept into the system.  Please leave a comment or drop me a line if you find anything and I’ll iron out any wrinkles post haste!