Something for the weekend

I for one am really glad that it's nearly weekend. It's been great week, and challenging in all sorts of good and exciting ways, but I'm really, really ready for a little down time!

Have you got any exciting plans lined up?
Things here are getting pretty busy here as the end of the year approaches, so we've got an action-packed weekend.

First stop is the Handmade Contemporary Fair (old Food Wine Design) at Hyde Park. I've always wanted to go to this, but this is the first year I am actually going to make it. I'm looking forward to hopefully seeing some good art pieces, as we still have plenty of bare walls downstairs.  And maybe have a glass of wine or two...

As Friday afternoon closes in, here are a few things that I've come across this week that I thought you might find interesting:

This article on Design Mom about extroverts raising introverts.
I must admit I've never really given the introvert/extrovert division too much thought in the context of parenting. But I really do hate the way people make introversion sound like a "condition." (No prizes for guessing which camp I fall into! INTJ and proud of it.) But when I think of times in my life when I have just been completely emotionally drained, I can definitely identify with the concept of just having people overload and "hitting some sort of emotional wall and mentally checking out, or getting grumpy."

I have a strong suspicion that my eldest daughter might fall into the introvert camp, and my husband and I are definitely a combo of introvert/extrovert (boy, has it taking some explaining when I don't want to attend every. single. social. event) so I'm definitely going to try do some reading up on this in the future.

Speaking of reading, I promised a while ago that I'd let you know what I thought of Naomi Wood's Mrs Hemingway. While I'm not going to go into exhaustive detail here, I really enjoyed the book and it was perfect to read on the beach. It's also inspired me to go back and read some of the original works, which I haven't done since early university days. However I do think you need to have a basic biographical knowledge of the man or you'll be a little bit lost.

Mrs Hemingway is a tough act to follow. and unfortunately the task fell to Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things.  I do like Elizabeth Gilbert's writing. I know some people find it self-indulgent and whingey. But I enjoyed Eat, Pray, Love and Committed. But they're not up there with my favourites. And neither is the novel. It was good, but very long winded, and needed a sharper focus.

In a drastic change of direction, I'm now onto Zero to One. It's good so far. It's aimed at start-ups and entrepreneurs, and I'm hoping it's not one of this business books that could actually be summarised into three pages of bullet points instead of taking up pages and pages of waffle expanding on one very singular idea.

But I'll let you know.

Happy weekend wherever you are and whatever you might be getting up to.