Tag: Life

When I am a wealthy woman…

Bloganuary Day 13

Today’s Prompt: If you had a billion US dollars, how would you spend it?

Well! Imagine that! That is a serious bit of money! Which just reminds me…i forgot to buy my Powerball ticket for tonight🤦🏽‍♀️😂 Of course I wouldn’t need to buy one if I had all that money but I’d probably do it anyway just because I can.

Photo by John Guccione http://www.advergroup.com on Pexels.com

So what will I do? First things first, I will donate a 10th of it to Gift of the Givers. They are a charity organisation who do amazing work in South Africa as well as all over the world. They have helped the release of hostages, helped out at every major disaster around the world over the 10+ years and in South Africa. Their founder and leader is Dr Imtiaz Sooliman and he is based in my home town. He used to treat my mum when he was still a practising medical doctor. You can read about how a visit to Turkey sealed his fate and, if you are moved to, contribute to the foundation here.

I will also donate 10% to the SPCA. They do amazing work. I will also start a fund that would take of the needs of old people’s pets as it is exteremly expensive to maintain a pet in South Africa. A visit to the vet costs more than a visit to the GP.

Thereafter, I will definitely give my family and friends a share of it, especially those who have always been there for me. Then I will invest it so that my son and I can live a fantastic life travelling the world. I will make us visit every museum and classic little bookshop I can find and he will make us attend every F1 race and probably every car manufacturers headquarters as well.

I will buy a house somewhere in the world where I can see the sea and the mountains (much like one can in Cape Town) from my writing room. It will also need to have a beautiful garden that I can walk through and ground myself in everyday. Can you imagine the size of the library I will have!

Photo by Ricardo Esquivel on Pexels.com

My son will have whatever he needs which may not be same as what he wants. He will have to work for the things that he wants but doesn’t need. I will buy my dad his dream cottage by the sea where he can step out of his door and go fishing every day if he so chooses.

Lastly, well for now anyway, I will set up a foundation that mentors and perhaps sponsors South Africans who are motivated to make something of themselves. Age will not be a factor as not everyone knows what they want in their 20’s. If you have only found your purpose at age 70 and you are looking for support and guidance on how to make it happen, our doors would definitely be open to you. We so desperately need to make South Africa the place where dreams can come true in order to uplift our people and our economy.

So yip, that is just some of the things that I will do with my billion dollars. Nothing too fancy. Now note, I say and will and not would as it’s still very possible that I will be a billionnaire one day. I live in faith. Nothing is impossible.😉

Let me know what you will be doing with yours in the comments.

Lost treasure

Bloganuanry Day 4

Today’s prompt: What is a treasure that’s been lost?

The first thought that came to mind was my mum. She was a treasure to us and to many that she came into contact with. Her passing was a great loss to our family and to the community she lived and worked it.

There is another treasure though that also came to mind and that is our safety or perhaps I should say, our freedom. In South Africa, it’s often our physical safety and freedom. Like most countries, there are good spots and bad spots in every city and I try to keep to the good spots but there are still extra precautions we have to take like having burglar bars on our windows and having security gates on our doors and you can’t leave valuables in plain sight in your car. We therefore live in a state of constantly being on our guard which means that we constantly in a state of stress which can’t be good for us. I do believe that there are very few countries in the world where people are safe but I guess in SA, the risk of being the victim of a crime is higher than most especially in some areas.

I do believe that as wonderful as the internet is, it has made it easier for criminals to grow their networks and to get to us. It is actually so sad. I didn’t realise how vunerable we were until I read Jeffery Deaver’s book “The Broken Window” in about 2009. Although it was fictional, it was frightening to discover how our information could be manipulated and used if it lands in the wrong hands. While identity theft was always a possibility, criminals had to work much harder to get your information before the internet came along. So while it so much easier to connect these days and to share, how you put the information out there can put you at risk. This unfortunately is a global problem.

I will always take whatever precautions I can to hinder the criminals but I won’t let the fear of what could happen dictate everything that I do. If I did I wouldn’t have this blog and then I wouldn’t have met all the awesome people that I have over the past year especially.

That’s it for today. Bye for now.

Teddy Bears and Geese

Bloganuary Day 3 – what a challenge!

Today’s Prompt: What is the earliest memory you have?

Well. I honestly don’t know what my earliest memory actually is. I do remember my tartan teddy which I wrote about last year. He got lost before I was 4 I would say but it was clearly a pretty tragic event for me because I still remember him very clearly and the pic is just proof that he did exist and i am not going mad ..lol

The Farm

Other than my teddy, I remember having an awesome childhood. We spent a lot of time on the farm where I ran wild with my cousins and had a ton of fun. I remember my gran taking my sister and I for a walk through the sugar cane on our way to the dam. We dodged a huge cane rat and a snake that was in hot pursuit of it on that particular trip. I remember my cousin and I being chased by geese. We were in tears and our dads were crying as well but for a very different reason. They were crying tears of laughter at our stupidity especially since they did warn us. 😂 Of course my favourite memory of the farm was sunday afternoons when we would stop at my aunt’s shop to say goodbye and she would give us each a little bag of sweets. Well, guess who my favourite aunt on the farm was…lol

The Flats

I also remember us living in the local council flats. There were lots of kids to play with and play we did. Michelle was such a common name then that there was a Michelle in almost every block. When the mum’s would come out and shout for us at the end of the day, the name Michelle would be heard most often. One of my clearest memories of that time was the day my mum asked me to sit on the stairs and wait for the ice-cream man to come. I was so excited. When he did arrive and my mum came out, the coins had all disappeared. Turns out I had put them in my mouth and accidently swallowed them although I did not remember actually doing it at the time and to this day. Needless to say, we didn’t have any ice-cream that day and it took a few more days before that money was recovered. 🤦🏽‍♀️ TV came to South Africa in 1976. I was 3 years old then. We didn’t have a TV then. When we moved to the flats, my best friend’s family lived below us. They would let my sister and I watch a programme or two in the evenings. TV programming only started at 6pm.

I don’t know if the same thing happened to you but I noticed that the memories I do have of those early years are memories that have a strong emotion attached to them. Some are joyful and some are created through a traumatic or fear-filled event. If I am not mistaken, this has been proven in a study somewhere along the way. I know that Tony Robbins also talks about doing things, especially with your kids and loved ones, that invoke strong positive emotions to create lasting memories of the experience for everyone. I guess it clearly works.

Thanks for reading. I hope you had as fun with the topic as I did going down memory lane. Bye for now.