1 Hold your belly laughing when thinking of your friends who had to spend half their salary on keeping his or her other half happy.

2 Curl up on the couch watching the movie that YOU want to, while eating the food and desserts that YOU enjoy. Please make sure not to overdo this though, it is meant to give you a freedom of choice boost not an opportunity to binge because you are depressed.

3 Bubble bath - and it’s all yours! Take as long as you want soaking it up in the tub. No pressure to get ready, no rush. Set a more soothing mood with candles or dim lighting with aromatic scents and Valentine’s will probably see you more relaxed than anyone else you know.

4 Send out your own greetings, be it the form of cards, e-cards, poetry, cookies, chocolates etc., and send them to friends and family. Show them you are better than someone who sits and sobs simply because Valentine’s is around the corner.

5 Spend the whole day doing exactly what you want. If you like baking then bake or if you want to go through the entire Star Wars trilogy stopping, pausing, rewinding and fast forwarding then by all means go ahead.

6 If you’re in the mood for dressing up and making a statement then get that chic outfit on and have a wild night! This will make a statement that you love the fact that you are single. However, if you do bump into another Ms. or Mr. Lonelyheart somewhere in the evening out who catches your attention, then make sure the two of you talk about anything else apart from how both of you are single and your respective ex-es.

7 Spend the day at a place of interest. If you are alone on Valentine’s because you have been traveling or you are at new place then pick a local spot that fascinates you. This could be a museum or even a local shopping mall. Explore every bit of it that you can and you’ll find that learning more about a new place might be more fascinating than you expect it to be.

8 Waking up with a positive attitude is a definite must. Even as you open your eyes and get ready to face the day, Valentine’s or not, don’t allow your single status to become an issue. Revel in the thoughts of not having to wait for the shower or for your toothpaste to be squeezed in ways you don’t like it to be.

9 Go running or for a long walk. Burn off all that pent up energy from your system in a good way. If you have not yet picked out a hobby or a sport then this may be a good time to consider one. Remember, the key is in keeping yourself occupied.

10 Picking out something to do that you wouldn’t normally do. This may be a complete sane thing like arranging your underwear drawer or something drastic as skinny dipping at the beach. Do whatever you wish, as long as you are happy and if you have a friend who can accompany you on this grand feat, then even better.

11 Pen love notes or send poetry to your family and friends, as this would be a great time to feel loved and to keep yourself occupied. It may be as something as simple as “I value our friendship” or “It’s nice knowing you” or a full message on why you love them and the things you appreciate about them. This will definitely not only make your day, it’s bound to make theirs as well.

12 Have a deliciously long no alarm day! Spend the day lazing around in bed if rest is what you need. No alarm to start your day, no one pressing you to get moving. It’s just you, yourself and knowing that rest is all you need.

This excerpt is taken from Surviving Valentines Day from On Being Human

Finding a date for Valentines day

No one really wants to be alone on Valentines day so if you are single you need to be a bit proactive about getting a date and meeting new people.

Just as you are searching for that perfect Valentine’s date, the other person may be doing the same thing, and the more you hold back about whether you will be seeing the person again or not, the more time you are wasting for everyone.

You can get some great dating tips from movies although don’t expect the presence of an orchestra or for Enrique Iglesias’ Hero to burst into song when you have found that someone special or when you kiss your Valentino good night.

An excellent choice of a movie to actually catch the urgency of getting a date would be “See Jane Date” The tagline of this movie is “Meet Jane. She’s always one date away from finding the perfect guy” and there could not be a more apt description of the movie itself. She is a successful career person but allows herself to feel completely inadequate, solely because she doesn’t have a man in her life.

Her competitive cousin’s wedding is just around the corner and she needs to give the impression that all is well in her love life. She moves from one dating disaster to the next, always hoping that this may be the person she can take to the wedding and every time she ends up with a disaster worse than the previous one.

I won’t spoil the ending for you but take the time to watch this if you are feeling in the “find me a date” mode. Make it a point to not look too hard, too fast. The rule of slow and steady wins the race works more often than you might think! Very often, when you rush into things you find that things are not quite what they seem to be.

Also (and this is a very important point), you must be very sure you know what you want in a person. Of course you may not find a person with every single thing you had in mind, but having some idea of the kind of person you would like spend time with will make things easier for you and the other person without taking up too much time. If you have no clue, you might go on 100 dates and still say that you haven’t found anyone to be with!

Getting the word out on the grapevine can sometimes be even faster than looking for a date online. But this also depends on who you get to help you get the word out. If there are people you can trust enough, tell them that you are looking for a date and they’ll probably have this other friend of a friend who also told them the same thing and will probably arrange for a hook up.

If you feel that you are fed up with the conventional methods of dating and are in the mood for trying something new, why not take a look at online dating?. If you have tried meeting people through support groups, friends, even blind dates and none of this has worked for you, then why not give this a shot?

Cupid strikes in ways you never expect, but do try to keep your options open and have minimal expectations. When you convince yourself that you will definitely meet the love of your life this way and it doesn’t happen the only broken heart that’s going to be around is yours.  When all else fails make sure not to be alone on Valentines day.

If there’s no date, so be it. Have a girls night in, rent out Meet Jane Doe and have a good laugh about what you didn’t do. There’s always tomorrow for the man of your dreams to walk through the door.

Great Valentines Day Gift Ideas

Complete Trivia has started a community site for trivia entertainers. Selling quiz products is one side of the site, more interesting is the offer of free advertising for entertainers. Trivia nights are traditionally run on the quiet nights of the week, Tuesdays, Wednesdays not Fridays and Saturdays. Anyone in Australia interested in trivia?

The site is called Instant Trivia and it’s my first Joomla site. For anyone unfamiliar with the name, it is what is called a content management system. Once installed it has a built in editor and categorisation system that makes the navigation elements of a website relatively easy to apply and change within an administration area. There are numerous plugins that can enable a shop, give profile pages, publish a magazine, be a directory and add any number of modules in various areas for ads, quotes, menus and other things.

It has been a journey to lean the basics but it has been a good journey. I still have much to learn and am looking forward to making new templates when there is time for new joomla sites that I have planned. For now I’m just proud to have made the first, basic as it will seem to a real web designer.

So if anyone likes trivia, you can take a look at http://www.instanttrivia.com.au and pick up trivia quiz products for fund raising, parties, pubs, bars and clubs. They do new quizzes every week for venues who have weekly events.

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Thousands of people blog these days, some every day. Ugly word isn’t it? We might have preferred it to be a conversation  but a shortened version would be a con, or an online journal and we might have ended up with OJ which associates with Simpsons, so web log or blog for short is what we ended up with.

And if Fred Bloggs comes to mind then perhaps that’s fitting as well because the blog is a nobody’s diary, the everyman’s chat, the woman’s own gossip column just as much as it’s a tutorial or advertising venue for businesses and a way for ‘real’ authors to store those witty snippets that won’t fit into their novel.

So welcome to my blog. I’m a nobody from Australia who has been a bookseller forever and now I make websites and talk to no one on the internet.  Funny world isn’t it? I recall reading a science fiction novel a very long time ago about a girl who never left the house but suddenly wanted to who lived in a world where no one ever left their house because they communicated via computer and had no need to. That’ll never happen I thought…

There was a time before computers wasn’t there? When we visited friends rather than calling them four times a year, one when we phoned our friends rather than messaging them while we do other things. When we went to the movies rather than watching them on a plasma. When we went dancing in public. When we actually ate good food in a restaurant rather than absorbing imaginary food from a celebrity chef.

Does this sound like that comedy skit - “When I were a kid we didn’t have no shoes and we had to walk ten miles to school” ! Getting older does that to you. Even the deprivations appear to have a gloss that the neon advertisements fail to provide. Does anyone else long to see flawed people in a movie, people of different shapes and size who don’t have all the answers? Modest, hardworking, nice people with a gentle, well mannered sense of humour?

There’s plenty of them you know. They aren’t on the TV because they’re blogging. They’re blogging about auntie Kath’s wedding, about how to knit and make mosaics, about how awful it is to be 17, about their annual holiday and anything else that they have an interest in. So here’s to you fellow bloggers all over the world.

Maybe we don’t have anyone reading or listening to us but we are talking and sharing if any one wants to. If you blog yourself, please leave me a comment. It’s a lonely life as a blogger. I know there is a lot of people who still say hello to strangers when you pass them on the street because they’re not really strangers, they’re neighbors.

So if you are a nobody, a gentle person, a neighbor or a blogger, feel welcome to click on that comment box and say hello.  You have no idea how nice it is to have someone answer when you speak and to return to a blog and find a comment ( nice ones that is) gives a thrill of genuine joy. We are not alone and talking to ourselves like a madwoman, we are a child of the universe with a right to be here.