My new love aka Peanut Butter Puffins

Hello Lovelies!

Finding interesting, quick, relatively healthy, vegan, wheat free breakfast cereals in the UK can be a pretty depressing activity. In fact, if it wasn't for Doves Farm's Chocolate Stars and Low Fat Flakes, I think I'd be a very depressed bunny indeed. Hence, I decided it was time to get a bit creative and after hearing Nicky and Laura declaring their love of Peanut Butter Puffins all the time, I decided to take the plunge and order myself a couple of boxes.

These little crispy, puffy pillows are utterly divine. They hit that perfect spot between salty and sweet with a good peanutty kick to satisfy any health bloggers nut butter cravings! They're also really rather healthy, for a processed cereal and the ingredients list is gorgeously natural! I'm sold... I can see the start of a rather expensive addiction.

You can grab them from iherb and provided you only order one or two boxes, the airmail shipping really isn't too bad (and only took around a week and a half to arrive)!

Questions:
Have you tried Peanut Butter Puffins?
What's your current favourite breakfast treat?

Lush Volcano Foot Mask Review

Hello Lovelies.

Today I'm going to be bringing you a review of this bad boy - Volcano Foot Mask from Lush.

Volcano is one of those phoenix-esq Lush products. It used to be around a looong time ago as part of the Fresh range, then it went, then it came back, then (I think) it went again and now it's back, it a smaller tub. A product's gotta be good to have made its reappearance that many times - no matter how often we try to kill it, it just won't die.

Volcano is part foot mask, part foot scrub and oh my goodness, do I love it. It's packed with yummy things like papaya and lemon (packed full of antiseptic cleansing power), tomatoes (they're deodorizsng apparently...), a multitude of other anti-fungal and astringent herbal bits and errr, potatoes. Yeah, I'm not sure either. All of this is mixed into a based of kaolin and pumic to give your feet a good deep clean and exfoliate.

To use it, you simply need to slather it on - not too thickly though:

Next, wrap your feet in cling film or two plastic bags and leave for 10 minutes. Spend the majority of those 10 minute admiring your new, cheap-as-free shoes and attempting not to break your neck when you need a wee.

I can definitely see this look going down well for A/W 2011 fashion, no?

After your 10 minutes are up, unwrap your feet and give them a good massage. This will help the exfoliation process and (if you're anything like me) warm your feet up a bit too! Then, plunge them into a bowl of warm water and rinse thoroughly. No, seriously, if you think you've finished rinsing, keep going. A white mask of kaolin does not an attractive foot make.

To finish, slather your feet in a luxuriously rich moisturiser, Ta-daa super soft feet!

One thing I will say is this isn't a massively moisturising foot mask, and it does have a lot of active ingredients. If your feet are really dry or cracked, you might want to opt for something else. I find this leaves my feet feeling really fresh and tingly afterwards but equally, that could be less of a nice feeling if your feet are already a bit sore.


Available from: Lush (online and instore) for £5.50
Would I buy this product again? Yes!

*Disclaimer* This product was sent to me for review purposes

Small moments of joy

Hello lovelies,

It's Friday (apparently!) which means it's nearly the weekend - do you have anything lovely planned? For me, the weekend and weekdays are barely distinguishable from one another at the moment! I thought I'd share some of the small moments of joy from the past week that have made my 5th week of house arrest a little more bearable...

♥ Leaving the house on Monday night
I went to a pub, an actual pub with people and everything. It's a long time since I've been to a pub (because of anxiety issues) so this was really quite special - I spent an evening with awesome people I didn't really know, chatting about protesting and the best thing? The pub had a cat that I got to fuss!

♥ A visit from my best friend on Tuesday
Admittedly, I was a little silly as I made us walk into town and wore myself out but I love spending time with Katie and her gorgeous son. It was so lovely and I very much appreciated my Iced Tea!

♥ Even more visits on Thursday
My friend Graham came to see me on Thursday afternoon - I love spending time with Graham, we always have such interesting chats. On Thursday we chatted about activism, anarchist philosophy, theology, feminism and gender. Graham and I kept each other sane when we were working for the same church so it's always nice to get time to catch up with him. I then had a lovely visit from my mother-in-law and one of my other best friends, Mary who took me off to the Farmer's Cart for afternoon tea, which was a bit of a disaster as they served no gluten free options and no vegan options either. I had to beg them to do me a bowl of crisps. I did however have this gorgeous smoothie:

I felt like I should have been sipping it by a pool somewhere hot!

♥ Random surprise gifts

Sorry that I look an absolute state, however the flowers themselves are beautiful! I was just given them by a lady I barely know from a church I no longer go to who'd heard I was ill. It was such a wonderful surprise and the flowers are gorgeous (some of my favourite flowers actually!)

Question:
What have been the small joys in your life this week?

A difficult decision.

Hello Lovelies.

Are you having a nice week so far? What have you been doing with yourselves? This week I've mainly been enjoying...

munching cookies with a big glass of chocolate and hemp soya milkshake...

and learning how to knit!

But also, I've had to make a really hard decision this week. I already knew I wouldn't be well enough to run the York 10k I had scheduled in but I've also decided to pull out of the Great North Run. I'm gutted to be honest. I've been looking forward to it all year but I've had to look at my health at the moment and the ever decreasing amount of time left in the run up and realistically, I won't be able to safely train or take part in a half marathon in September. I'm still waiting to hear back from the CF Trust about whether I'll be able to defer my place to next year or not but needless to say, I'm pretty crushed about having to make this decision.

I'm actually finding it really frustrating to not be able to exercise - I miss running and yoga and cycling. I think I hadn't realised how much I use exercise to (successfully) control my anxiety issues. When I'm doing those things, I can get rid of any extra nervous energy that I'm carrying. When I'm not, I feel a bit like I might go crazy.

Question:
How do you help your body chill out when you can't exercise?

Taking the bull by the horns.

Aloha!

Remember this post about the comparison trap? Well I thought I'd give you a bit of an update on some progress I've made towards breaking the comparison trap.

One of my most stupid points of comparison was comparing myself to activist friends of mine and deciding I wasn't "activist" enough to be able to get involved in protests. Yeah, I know, stupid. To be fair, I've also had some issues with anxiety over the last year or two so I've found the thought of crowds a little terrifying.

However, it appears that being trapped in your house alone for over a month gives you plenty of time to think and you end up making some pretty good decisions. Mine has been that I need to stop just talking the talk and start walking the walk.

So how am I doing it? Well, as I said in the original Comparison Trap post, I think it's important to see if you can make an achievable goal out of the thing you're comparing yourself to. My achievable goal has been to read, read, read. One of the things that worried me was that I wouldn't have enough knowledge - thanks to my ridiculous amount of time off, I've been able to read plenty!

I've also taken steps towards getting involved in the local Stop the Cuts group (I even LEFT THE HOUSE last night to go to a workshop on Organising Protests.... leaving the house was amazing. I went to an actual pub and sat with actual people and everything. I mean yeah, I was falling asleep but still - I LEFT THE HOUSE!!!), I'm doing the promo for Just Do It and I'm going to this:

The Uk Feminista Summer School. It's a completely free weekend of seminars and workshops from some pretty awesome speakers (there's a full list on their website). At the moment, I know literally no-one going (terrifying!!) so if you're planning on going, do let me know!

Question:
What have you challenged yourself to do recently?