The Luxury Pooch.

Two years ago today we brought home from the animal shelter a scared, skinny, lethargic, flea-infested dog. We were full of hope but not sure what we were getting ourselves into.

That was the day Monty entered our lives, our sweet little west highland terrier, who has become the light of our lives.

Monty's arrival was the realisation of a long-held dream for me; I had wanted my own dog the whole of my adult life. I never hoped to be able to have my own west highland terrier as a puppy costs around NZ$1200. We bought Monty for NZ$30.

He became part of the family almost immediately, and it didn't take much longer before the wounds from his old life had disappeared. Now Monty {also known as Moo} is almost unrecognisable from the dog he once was. He's happy, healthy, confident, friendly, a good guard dog, and he has the most comical little personality.

Everyone who meets Monty loves him. Even children who are scared of dogs will bring themselves to pat him because he's so calm. My mother - who has never been interested in animals - fell head over heels for Monty and now has her own dog who she dotes on!

Like any self-respecting westie, Moo thinks he's the boss of the house. His daddy has nicknamed him The Luxury Pooch because he's developed quite a taste for luxury. The couch is his, the bed is his, our laps are most certainly his! He loves his dinner, loves his daily walk, loves snuggles, and really loves wrestling with his soft toys.

I knew I'd love having a dog, but I hadn't realised just how satisfying it could be.

On the other side of a hoop slump.

Time to get this somewhat neglected blog up and running again. I haven't written for a while, but that doesn't mean I've forgotten about my blog - definitely not. I've done a lot of thinking about the future direction of this blog, and I've decided to widen its scope. I love hooping as much as ever, and I still want to write about hooping... but there are other things I want to write about too. We shall see how things unfold this year.

Another reason I haven't written for a while is that my computer has had some issues, but fortunately they've been sorted out now.

I'm pleased to tell you that the hoop slump I went through late last year is over. It was an interesting experience and, although I'd be happy if I never had a hoop slump again, I don't regret going through it because I learned from it.

I asked my online hoop communities for advice and everyone was so generous with their help. It's a common problem, of course, in any discipline, to go through times of plateauing, of feeling flat and uninspired. So there were plenty of hoopers who had been there, done there, and come out the other side.

I'm grateful for my hoop sisters and brothers' advice but I actually disagreed with nearly all of it. The consensus seemed to be that in times like these, I should put the hoop down. Take a break. Go do something else that inspires you, and come back to the hoop later.

I have hooped every single day for nearly three years, and taking a break sounded sensible. But I knew that if I took a break I would most likely never hoop again. I don't know why - but I could feel that truth in my bones.

So I kept hooping. I experimented with different hoop sizes, different hoop tubing, different music different locations - everything external that I could change, I did. Nothing worked. I still felt like crap every time I hooped. And then one day I realised the problem was with me and the way I was hooping.

Back in October I discovered through a hoop injury that I prefer on-body hooping {hooping propelled by the core: waist, hips, shoulder, chest, legs or head} to off-body hooping {hooping driven mostly by the hands and arms, and incorporating jumps, throws, tosses, hand-spins, etc}. On-body {or bodyrocking} feels so gooooood to me. But it's also very energetic, and I had become lazy and gone back to my off-body ways.

I needed more bodyrocking in my life!

After that, I decided one of my goals for this year was to become a bodyrocking ninja queen. {Or something like that.} Obviously, I do incorporate off-body moves into my flow as well to keep my flow well-rounded. But my focus is on bodyrocking and how wonderful it feels to have that hoop spinning around my shoulders or my waist.

Hoop slump.



It’s the middle of summer here in New Zealand and finally the weather has caught up with the season. December has been a gloriously warm and fine month – just as it should be.

I love hooping at this time of the year. The long evenings mean I can hoop outside till 9pm, with birds twittering around me in the trees, light breezes cooling my skin, and the sunset light washing over me.

And yet, this year, I’m in a hoop slump – the worst I’ve ever experienced {okay, the only one I’ve experienced so far} and it seems to be related to my new hair. Hooping has been a struggle for me ever since I cut my dreads off. Which is ironic, because part of the reason I wanted to get rid of my dreads was that they were always getting caught in my hoop or knocking the hoop off-balance. I thought being dreadless would make hooping easier. So far, the opposite has been the case. I feel static, boring and lacking in creativity.

One of the things I am finding particularly difficult is no longer being able to head hoop. If I had a signature move, it would be head hooping. Head hooping is my favourite move: it brings me instant calm and happiness. When I was at Under The Spinfluence recently, my ability to head hoop was much admired. I even made a YouTube tutorial on head hooping – and now, here I am, having to learn it again myself! It seems that dreads provide excellent grip for the hoop while non-dreaded hair is just too slippery.

I have been told by other former dreadheads that these off-balance feelings are a natural part of releasing dreads for those who do any form of dance. That it takes the body a while to adjust to not having a lot of weight on the head. So I’m not panicking. I’m still showing up in my hoop every single day. And I’m practising head hooping like a demon – I will master it again!

Happy hooping,

Anne-Marie x

Midsummer reflections: Release

We are just about to release 2014 and move into 2015. And I have just released my dreads, after many years of having them - a really big step for me.

I never expected to get to the point where I wanted to let my dreads go. Sure, they could sometimes be annoying. They interfered with my hoop and they were so heavy they gave me headaches. But they were {literally} part of me, and part of my identity. Because they formed naturally over several years I developed a deep emotional attachment to them. People knew me and recognised me by my dreads, and they gave me a certain amount of cool. I loved how low-maintenance they were - I didn't even have to comb them.

The first suggestion of releasing my dreads came this time last year. I was irritated by them. They hung down to my hips, massive things that seemed to drain my energy. I took one tiny dread and combed it out, freaked out, and stopped halfway through. I definitely did not want to get rid of my dreads. My husband suggested I cut my dreads to a manageable length, and all was well again.

So when, this November, I started to feel twinges of wanting to get rid of the dreads, I figured it was just something that happened at this time of the year. I sat with the feeling for a while. Then one morning - just a couple of days before the anniversary of starting my dreads - I woke up convinced the dreads had to go. That evening two of my dreads actually broke off in my hands - something that had never happened before.

The next day I came home from work feeling like I was being smothered and couldn't breathe properly. I grabbed the kitchen scissors, handed them to my husband and told him to start cutting. He snipped them up to my shoulders ... ah, what a release. I took a bottle of conditioner and a comb and spent the weekend combing, combing, combing. Before I began on each dread, I ran my fingers over it and whispered, "I thank you - I release you."

In two days I had combed out 22 of my 42 dreads and filled an entire shopping bag with knotted hair. {I put most of it in the compost heap, but buried one dread under my elderflower bush in the garden.}
I spent the next two weeks combing out the rest of the dreads, just a few at a time.

This Saturday, just before the new moon and Midsummer, the very last dread was combed out. I washed my hair and rinsed it in rain water that had had rosemary, sage and lavender soaking in it, and allowed it to dry in the warm summer air.

And now I am starting to get to know this lovely new hair of mine. A lot of people don't recognise me; I still get a surprise when I see myself in the mirror. I love the feel of the wind on my scalp! I'm enjoying the texture of my hair, which somehow manages to be soft and rough at the same time {I've never had sleek, shiny hair}. My hair doesn't like to be combed or brushed; it just goes flat and sullen, like a dog that's been told off. So I comb it before I go to bed each night and finger-comb it each morning, which seems to work well.

Happy Midsummer to you all!

Before {the last picture I took of myself with dreads}:

After {completely dreadless and with hair freshly washed}:

A bookish obsession

“It wasn’t a very likely place for disappearances, at least at first glance…”

This is the first line in a book called Cross Stitch, by Diana Gabaldon, and from the moment I read it I was obsessed.

There is nothing as enticing as the siren song of a promising new book, waiting to be read. And there's nothing as frustrating as being unable to spend as much time as you would like on said new book because you have irrelevant small details to attend to ... like work, family and sleep.

I read Cross Stitch for the first time in September, when a colleague lent it to me. Yes, I know; I’m about 25 years behind the times, as this book was first published in the 1990s. But better late than never, right? I had heard a lot about this book, and it seemed to be one that inspired much devotion from its readers.

I bought second-hand copies of the first three books in the Cross Stitch series - there are, I think, about nine in all - and quickly found myself unable to read anything else. I just kept wanting to read Cross Stitch.

It tells the story of Claire, an English nurse who, in the summer of 1946, is on holiday in the Highlands of Scotland with her historian husband, Frank. On the festival of Beltane Claire wanders into an ancient stone circle, has a very odd experience there and eventually realises she’s been sucked back in time to the year 1743. Alone, friendless, unable to escape the Scots and suspected by the English, Claire is eventually forced to marry a young Scottish warrior, Jamie.

If you’ve read the book you’ll know what happens next, and if you haven’t … go read it to find out what happens next!

By early October I had to go cold turkey on Cross Stitch. I was on to the second book by this time, Dragonfly In Amber, which was just as compelling as the first book but with a sense of growing doom breathing from it. I began to dream about the story. Twice I woke myself and my husband up in the middle of the night by bursting into tears in my sleep. I didn’t want to go to work – I just wanted to read my book.

So I got my husband to hide the books from me. Yes, it was that bad.

What is it about these books that inspire such obsession? Well, they are extremely well-written. They’re rollicking good stories, with plenty of adventure and humour. They’re richly detailed, without being boring. They suck you into the world of 18^th century Scotland; you can almost smell the mist, the cold, the dirt and sweat, the wool of the Highland kilts. It’s the wonderful characters that really get me, though: they’re so realistic and well-rounded that you quickly feel like you know them.

You can read more reviews of Cross Stitch here.

Starz has recently released a TV series of the book, called Outlander, which is worth watching. John and I have been watching it on Lightbox.

[Just to clarify: the book is called Cross Stitch in New Zealand, but is known as Outlander in other countries.]

Happy reading,

Anne-Marie x