Dating is like fishing...

If it is, I shouldn't do it! Oh something to talk about!

Fifteen years ago, in New Zealand, my children were pretty much grown up, and I decided I needed to meet people. So I joined Find Someone Online (it was actually a different name but was connected with FSO) and started chatting online. I loved it, so many people to talk to! I met a lot of people (mostly women) who are still my friends 15 years later. I would travel from my home, Hamilton, to visit friends in Auckland and Wellington, party, dance, play pool, walk areas, and come home to go back to work. I'd go out again, same thing.

Eventually I was hooked by a man I later married, and he suggested we move to Australia. We came to Brisbane in 2005 and I've been here since then.

Many years ago, before FSO, before my kids, I used to ride motorbikes. I felt the need to ride again, so I bought another one when I joined FSO. I loved it, and in Brisbane my husband and I bought ourselves motorbikes and joined Ulysses. This I loved too - we'd ride just about every weekend, whether south through the Gold Coast and into NSW, west through Aratula and Cunningham Gap and around Lake Somerset, north to Maleny and Kenilworth, or east along the coast. By halfway through this membership I had my V-Star, which I absolutely loved!

My husband had a motorcycle incident in 2010, only 5 years since we'd moved here. He was run off his bike, rolled on the road and ended up with head and shoulder injury. Three years later he decided he'd had enough of living in Brisbane and he moved back to his kids in New Plymouth. He left me in Brisbane just before I went into PA Hospital for my brain aneurysm surgery, and I suffered a stroke.

Living alone is sometimes very, very hard for a person like me. I can't now work, sometimes I can't even speak, but writing is usually what I do every single day. Okay, yes I know I haven't written into my blog for 2 weeks, but writing isn't always just that! Right now I am waiting for some funding that I am really hoping I can get to publish my first book. Did you ever see the project? You really should.... and help me!

Anyways, two years ago, just after my husband separated, I joined the RSVP. "Get started for free!", it said. This was very different from FSO and the way I was "able" to contact any man who intrigued me. It seems, I didn't find out until after I had joined it, I would have to pay RSVP in order to talk to any person! I tried it for just one month, and ended up walking away from it. Until this year, when I rejoined it probably mostly because I'd actually forgotten anyone I'd met off it!

For me, that seems not good. If there are any women - or men - on this site who have had a stroke, live alone, need company but really find it hard to talk to any people even without paying to do so, they surely live like me.

So this month I heard of a different dating site, called Planet Earth, which I felt would have been very good. "Join now" it said, "and start meeting incredible, green, conscious singles." I went into it, joined it, filled out my profile, answered so many details... and found out some stuff that they had not advertised. For instance, if you want to put in more than 3 photos, you can't unless you are a paid member. If you want to talk to any one you can't unless you are a paid member. This online dating site is bad. Just like RSVP. Bad. What am I doing??

My own days are just for me. I write, I do quote pictures for my Reibus site, I work at the Redcliffe Art Gallery each Monday and Friday morning, I am now a trained STEPS leader, I am signed up as an events volunteer with MBC. I have my daughter and two friends up this way whom I see every week. I had an article about me published in the local newspaper, and I'm getting written about in the Synapse magazine. I have a Pozible link which I hope will get me funds for my publishing (are you helping me???). I am now working on an old china cabinet to repair it. Living here, living alone, is me. It's taken me two years to realise this, but now I am enjoying it. Yes, I will sometimes get very upset. Sometimes I won't talk to or see anyone. Sometimes I'll visit them and love chatting and hug them at the end of that visit and come home and just get back into myself, I need to do that.

But right now, I love my life. Enjoy your own.