Two people in the last week have said to me 'I don't know how you fit it all in! You do so much!'
Both were in response to me telling them about sewing my own pants, and I got to wondering (again) whether I do actually do a lot of things, or whether I just talk about things a lot. Hmm. Back in 2011 on an ancient blog I made a list of things I don't do. Some things have changed, and some haven't. I still don't iron clothes. We have an iron - it's electric, but not a steam iron - and I have no idea where it is. I try to keep on top of the main living areas of the house but the rest of it is literally a building site. I'm slightly better at remembering birthdays, but I still have a small pile of Christmas presents waiting to go in the post, and I didn't send any cards at all. I barely grew anything in the garden last year. I'd like to say I don't watch much TV, but I started watching Call the Midwife right from the very first episode over Christmas and less than a month later I'm well into Series 8. I don't think I'm particularly unusual, but I have enough of these 'you do so much!' conversations that it makes me feel like I'm doing something different to the people I'm talking to. I do sometimes have to remind them that I don't have children - and I often marvel that people with children get anything else done at all. I do work full time - there's a two hour commute whenever I got to the office, but I often work at home at least two days a week. Even though these conversations are face to face, and I don't actually use social media that much, I wonder whether they're a symptom of the kinds of things we see on social media - comparing our outsides to other people's insides. I'm just as guilty of it as anyone else, and I wonder whether when I waffle on about gardening, running, plastering, flute playing, sock knitting, underwear sewing and the like, I give the impression I'm doing all of those things every day. Because clearly I'm not. I haven't even picked up my flute since before Christmas. I sewed six pairs of pants, and then ran out of fabric and stopped. I bought some plaster in November and it's still sat in the bag. I often have a brief flurry of doing something, and then don't do it again for quite a while while I get enthusiastic about something else. Anyway, I thought I'd keep track of what I was doing this week, to see if there's a pattern to my days. This is something I often do at work (to keep me on track) but rarely do at home, although it seems I did do it for a month or so back in August 2013. I'm not sure how much detail I'll go into, and I'll probably post at the end of the week rather than every day, but let's see what happens. And now I'd best get my act together - I was planning to leave for work twenty minutes ago...
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Well. Here we are at the start of 2020! Let's begin with a look back at 2019 shall we? It's felt rather less eventful than 2018 (thank goodness). After looking back on a rather busy 2018, I started the year thinking about living seasonally, and then was promptly thrown into living seasonally when the snow arrived. I declared an intention to start walking more, which I've sometimes kept up with, sometimes not. February started with a chicken tragedy, when a stoat found its way into the hen house and killed Hermione and Luna. We buried them under the fruit trees, and Mildred and Maud, physically fine but intensely traumatised, came to live in our house for a few weeks (rather disrupting the beginning of my work sabbatical). They slowly recovered while we made reinforcements to their run, and at the end of February we collected three new ladies, freed from battery cages, to add to our little flock. In March, I pondered January and February in the garden, went for a run around a local reservoir, and waffled on about the chickens (there was a lot of that in 2019). In April I finally finished knitting a cardi for a friend's daughter (it was very late, and rather small), and continued taking my morning constitutional walks around the local lanes. In May I talked about chickens (again), and did an unusual amount of travelling (to Copenhagen, Glasgow, and Hebden Bridge). I finished the month with a look at May in the garden. I didn't say much in June, but spent quite a bit of time chasing sheep out of our fields (something I've just had to do again today, unfortunately). In July, work got unexpectedly busy, and I neglected the garden, but did find time for a series of mini adventures. In August it rained quite a lot, but the sun shone too. I pondered June and July in the garden, when we tidied up quite a bit, and a tiny hare took up residence. I walked six miles to meet a friend in a cafe, and took a trip to Calke Abbey. In September, I talked about our hay making! Most exciting. I also reflected on how rainy August had been and how soggy the garden was. I did a bit of sunbathing with the chickens. In October we finally had the builders in, and there was lots of upheaval as they replaced the kitchen ceiling. The chickens weren't impressed at being confined (but would have tripped up a builder or got stuck in a cement mixer if let out). I reflected on September and October in the garden, and how much I'd neglected it. We did still manage to grow our first apples though! By November, the builders had left, and we were slightly overwhelmed by what we still had to do. I went on a beekeeping course (which was interesting, but convinced me I was not going to keep bees any time soon), and I went on and on about how rainy the autumn was. In December, Beaky the chicken was ill, and had to be admitted to our in-house chicken hospital wing for a week and a half (which gave us a nice excuse not to do any DIY). I'm delighted that she made a full recovery. I finished the year enthusing about my love of cafes.
So there we are - another year gone by. I feel like 2019 has been rather sedate in comparison to 2018, but in reality it's been our first full year in our new house, so there's still been lots of settling in to do, and we've had major building work done after all. I've had some unexpectedly busy times at work too, a little out of the normal routine, which have taken a lot of time and head space but which should (fingers crossed) make things more interesting soon enough. How is it that Christmas takes me by surprise every year? Every year I vow to have all my presents bought and wrapped by the end of November (wise advise from a friend who used to work in retail), and yet every year somehow it's December, and there's only three weeks to go. This year we weren't helped by a poorly chicken who has needed a spell in the Chicken Hospital Wing (also known as our ex-kitchen). We're still not entirely sure what was wrong with Beaky, but we noticed over a few days that she was slower than the others, standing apart from them fluffed up and sometimes with her head under her wing. She seemed to be getting worse rather than better, so we brought her inside, and after a bit of observation, took her to the vets, who gave her a very undignified examination and injections of calcium and antibiotics, and sent her home to either get better or die. Fortunately, after eleven days of living in our house, with an epsom salts bath and a massage every day, and plenty of rest and treats, she has (fingers crossed) made a miraculous recovery. Needless to say, DIY was put on hold as we can't have drilling disturbing a poorly chicken. We did let the others in every day though to make sure Beaky kept in vague touch with the flock, and they took great delight in inspecting the building works. Mildred made herself right at home in the middle of the living room carpet. So I'm blaming the chickens for my festive incompetence this year. Their house, of course, is fully cleaned out with a layer of fresh hay. Our house, of course, is full of chicken bedding, and most of our crockery has been used to feed the chickens and is in high need of a thorough scrubbing. Still, I'm off work now until the 6th, so plenty of time for scrubbing and tidying and hanging around, and my favourite over-Christmas activity of plotting and scheming what adventures will happen next year. I' hoping we'll manage to get away on holiday, which requires rather more planning now we have the feathery ones to see to. I'm also planning to get back into the habit of writing on here. With one thing and another it's rather fallen off the list this year, and I've missed it. There's the usual exercise-related goals of course, and house-tidying goals, and of course major DIY to do and field walls to fix, and I'm hoping to grow at least some of our own food this year - something I failed at spectacularly last year.
But there I go again, making far more plans than I have time for, as usual. I hope I'm not the only one who does that. But what to miss out? More pondering to come I think. We've had some glorious weather round here lately. I stopped on the way to work the other day to take this picture, which I've been meaning to do for months but the conditions have never been quite right (and after all that I snapped in a rush and got the phone wire too - oh well!) I've been unexpectedly busy at work lately, which has taken up a lot of head space. And the garden is growing, my greenhouse is overflowing with plants that are too big for their pots, and I have slight palpitations every time I look at a dry stone wall as they all seem to be falling down in front of my eyes. Still, we are here, and things are peaceful aside from the chaffinch that calls outside the window for sixteen hours a day.
And I now have a phone which will take photographs, and will also supposedly let me write blog posts, although this is the third time I've typed this now and it's still not let me post. So while I was going to say that will encourage me to post more often, we'll have to see whether that happens. In the meantime, here's Bessie flouting the 'no chickens on the furniture' rule. Goodness me, a lot happened in 2018. I've found myself quite overwhelmed with the thought of looking back. However, I've done summaries of the year on my blogs for several years now, and I didn't want to have a missing year, so here goes. I started 2018 on my old blog, with a look back at 2017 - a year of DIY and bureaucracy as we finished decorating, sold our old house, and waited for the paperwork wheels to turn. I went for a nice snowy walk in the woods, and visited some local nature reserves. I made my own lip balm (which I'm still using, that stuff lasts a long time), contemplated learning how to identify trees in winter (something I've still not done), and started running again (for probably the 100th time). February was exciting, although it mostly didn't feel like it at the time. I started a series of trail races with my sister, and took her for a walk past our new house (which we still didn't own at that point, and which I was starting to feel quite daunted by). I cocked up and then rescued a knitting project (no change there then), and pondered what I'd been reading lately (I'd forgotten I used to do that). Finally, in the middle of the month, we exchanged contracts on the new house, and celebrated with an almond croissant in our favourite cafe (which has since closed down, sob). We finally moved on Monday 26th Feb, and by Tuesday 27th we were snowed in for several days. March was a flurry of snow and moving boxes, and also moving blogs. I started this blog off by rambling about how we'd got here, then did a tour of our (rather soggy) fields, and our dilapidated outbuildings. It snowed again, and we got stuck in the city for a couple of days. I fell into a pattern of getting up early, and started trying to fix some of our tumbling down old dry stone walls. And we sneaked off and got married without telling anyone. April started with yet more snow (yawn), a little bit more running, and some rather soggy cycling. I built a plastic greenhouse, which then blew down, so I rebuilt it in a different place. I had a surprisingly crafty episode, knitting dishcloths and making my own shampoo bars. I went on a dry stone walling course, and finally the sun came out and it started to feel a little bit like spring (we also started our mouse-eviction-programme) which lasted most of the month, fortunately with no casualties. In May, the sun shone again (on a bank holiday no less!) and I acquired a push-along lawnmower and spent quite a bit of time lying on the newly mown grass. We got a good view of a hare, and I bought a scythe and started making space in a field for growing squash. Big excitement at the end of the month as the neighbouring cows arrived to hang out in our fields for a few months. June was a month of flowers. I could barely keep up with the growth in one greenhouse, and started to build another. I had a minor celebration as the second greenhouse went up, and I finally finished fixing one of the walls that had fallen down. I went on a very flowery bike ride, and the garden was abundant and beautiful. I ignored my blog for the first couple of weeks of July while we had visitors, day trips, and started demolishing walls. I started running again and entered an ultra marathon. We had a lizard in the living room, and visited a local fair. July in the garden was super hot, and we let the cows into our final field as they were running out of grass elsewhere. In August, we picked bilberries in the local lanes, and went for a day out to our nearest Wildlife Trust reserve. I recapped half a year of living in our new house, and took a fortnight off work, during which it rained rather a lot. The garden was lush and abundant. In September, the chickens arrived! So very exciting. A cow got into the runner bean patch, we harvested a lot of courgettes, and nearly finished the outdoor chicken run. As usual, I went through a phase of getting out of the routine of posting here. In October, I visited Biddulph Grange, pondered what on earth we were doing out here, and pottered around in the autumn sunshine. The chickens marauded round the garden as I laid compost ready for an edible windbreak. Work got rather busy, and I spent two weeks here on my own while Peter jetted off to the other side of the world, although I don't seem to have mentioned that here. In November, I waffled a lot about chickens. I met a friend for lunch in the botanical gardens, and had a little trip to the seaside. I spent quite a lot of time outside, some of it in my pyjamas. It felt like it was foggy a lot. In December, I lost track of time again, and caught up with myself by waffling on about the chickens (again). I finally finished a crocheted blanket I'd started in the summer, and we had an exciting day of freezing rain. I ended the year feeling rather poorly, but festive. What an eventful year! It feels like it's flown past in a flash, and yet I also feel like we've lived here forever. So many things have happened that I haven't written about here too, and I've got a stack of photographs I've not shared.
There's no chance of me catching up now - here we are more than half of the way through January, I've not posted here at all, and the Christmas tree is still up. Oh well. I'm planning a rather less eventful and more settled 2019. Right now the snow is falling, and I'm settling down to a bit of knitting (which I hope to finish before the summer). A friend is due to arrive tomorrow, but given the snow she might not make it. We'll see. Suddenly my head is starting to clear. For weeks now I've been focused and barely felt like I've had time to draw breath. This has been a particularly busy period at work, and unusually I've had to be in the office pretty much every working day since October, which has meant a lot of driving. For the last couple of months it's meant leaving in the dark, usually around 6am, and getting home in the dark. I know millions of people do this every day, and I'm not claiming any special status, but goodness me it's nice to have stopped for a while. I've been ill this last week, just a cold and a bit of a bug, which stopped me in my tracks for a couple of days and left me walking round like a wraith with a head full of cotton wool for several more. I went to work most days, but I shouldn't have - sometimes I just found myself staring at a simple email without a clue what to do about it. Yesterday I was starting to feel a little better, and popped out to two local market towns to finish my Christmas shopping. Well, I say 'finish' - in truth, there are still some presents to buy... but I've got all the ones that are needed for Christmas day itself. The weather was mostly good yesterday, and finally I started to feel a little festive. Earlier in the year I joined a local wind orchestra, and last night we had our Christmas concert, which was most jolly indeed and reinforced the festive mood nicely.
Today I've had a lovely leisurely morning, the chickens are bimbling around in the garden, and I have the house to myself for a couple of hours. My head feels clear enough to think about what needs to be done - and I can't tell you how thankful I am for a fully working brain. I completely take it for granted most of the time and I shouldn't. So this afternoon I'll be tidying, making a small gift for the neighbours, doing a bit of wrapping, cleaning out the chicken house, and maybe, if the rain lets up for a bit, bringing in a bit of greenery to make some kind of a wreath. Already I'm starting to plot what I'd like to do next year. I love this time of year for doing that. I'm just going to get these last few preparations out of the way and then find myself a nice new notebook and a set of pens and start doodling. I really have to get back into a routine of posting here. I miss it. I've been not quite thwarted, but discouraged, by technology. I used to take pictures on my camera, upload them to the laptop, resize them, then insert them into blog posts. My new phone takes pictures that are near enough as good as the camera (which I've now stopped carrying around) - but it uploads them to google photos, and unless I'm writing a post on my phone, I still have to download photos to the laptop, rename and then upload them back to the blog again.
All rather tedious, but I will get into a new rhythm soon enough. Not tonight though. Having sorted through my pictures from the last two weeks I'm far too exhausted to do anything with them and am going to sleep instead. I'm lucky. My job gets easier in the summer, and while there's still lots to do, I can slow the pace down a little and work at home a lot. I do still like to take a couple of weeks conpletely off work though, and this year I picked the last two weeks of August. It's a shame I missed the heatwave, although now it's a bit cooler it's easier to get things done outside. Or at least it would be if it stopped raining. The sun has shone a little, and we've had friends round for blackberrying, had a couple of days out, and some general pottering. My sister and my three nephews came for a camping trip - we managed a fair bit of playing outside and an hour in the tents before camp was transferred into the living room. I always have a feeling that I should be doing significant with my holidays. I 'should' be going on grand days out, conpleting epic projects, hey, even getting to the bottom of the washing basket. But somehow much of the time I take off work is spent just breathing, expanding into my space a little more. Catching up on the watering, digging an extra bed in the garden, sorting out storage in the bedroom, lingering over breakfast in a cafe with a book. I've still got a week left. A friend is coming over today to help me dig the foundations for the chicken run. I've made lentil soup for lunch, because somehow it seems like we might need warming up. I'll spend some time helping on her allotment later in the week.
I'm planning a trip to Biddulph Grange gardens one day too, and a couple more days will need to be spent in the garden preparing for the chickens, who we're collecting on Sunday. Can't wait. Shame I haven't got next week off too to play with them. Six months ago today we moved house. We were exhausted after two years of decorating, cleaning, packing and bureaucracy, and the night before moving day we only had two hours sleep. We both cried. We tried to sneak to our favourite cafe for a last consoling cuppa but it was full, so we got drinks to take away before driving, in two separate cars, over the hills to our new house. The removal men were already here, and had unloaded one van into the garage already, as instructed. We opened the house, and as the sky turned grey and a few flakes of snow started to fall, they (rather hastily) unloaded the other two vans into the living room while I rang the plumber and tried to turn the heating on. I can't say that first night was fun, and being snowed in for the next few days was adventurous rather than pleasant, but it gave us a chance to unpack, and to move all our possessions from the one warm room (which we'd intended to use as a temporary store) to a rather colder room (which we'd intended as a living room). So much has changed in six months, so I wanted to look back a little on the progress we've made. We moved on February 26th, and from then on through March, there was quite a lot of weather. We did some necessary work - filling potholes in the drive, and making a path across the lawn to the door - and the snowdrops arrived. March was a month of early mornings, sunsets, and not quite believing how lucky we were. We did some more practical things - started on the never-ending task of fixing our dry stone walls, reclaimed some of the stone from the collapsing old barn, put up a greenhouse, demolished an outbuilding, and spent yet more time staring at the view. And I finally achieved my dream of hanging washing out on my own washing line. In April it snowed (again), and then got rather soggy (again). I optimistically planted seeds (and rebuilt the greenhouse after it blew down), and we spent a lot of time taking wellies on and off in a futile bid to not have the house fill up with mud. Crocuses arrived, and then a parade of daffodils lined the driveway. I went on a dry stone walling course, and we acquired a proper glass greenhouse from a friend. We ate breakfast outside wrapped in blankets in the middle of the month, and by the end I was gardening in a t shirt. May was a month of grass and wild flowers. I acquired a push along mower, and a scythe, and we opened our fields to the cows from the neighbouring dairy farm. I planted raspberry canes and made raised (ish) beds and it was finally warm enough to take my socks off. June was lush. The garden grew faster than I could keep up with it, but by the end of the month the second greenhouse was up and stocked with tomatoes and cucumbers, and the courgettes and squashes were in the ground. We had our first salady harvests, I finally finished rebuilding my first dry stone wall, and socialising was done mostly outside. Oh, and we started dismantling two of the bedrooms on the first floor. July was hot. Too hot really. The surrounding grazing land turned brown, and the local farmers were feeding last year's hay to the cows. I traipsed back and forth to the greenhouse with watering cans, cursing myself for not plumbing in the water butts properly before the heatwave arrived. We dug in our first home made compost, and had our first harvests of raspberries, courgettes, cucumbers and beans. And now we're in August! The weather has turned a little - we've still had some hot days, but it's more like a normal English summer, and now I'm off work for a fortnight it's been raining rather a lot. We've been picking blackberries, harvesting more courgettes than it's sensible to eat, and our first calf arrived (and several more since). We had the excitement of scaffolding as the local farmer kindly removed our chimney from the roof, and Peter has been dismantling the chimney walls inside. We're also building a chicken coop ready for the arrival of our own mini flock next weekend. I don't think we've done too badly for our first six months. This was a big change for us, and we're finally starting to feel like we live here (probably a good thing as we've started dismantling walls).
I wonder what the next six months will bring? If you followed me over from my previous blog, you'll know that I'm an enthusiastic but somewhat slow and very sporadic runner. I frequently start running, keep it up for a few weeks, enter a ridiculous race (triathlon, marathon, series of trail races etc), then stop training, come last, have a nice day out and then not run again for several months. It's a pattern that's repeated itself many, many times over the last fifteen years or so. So when I found myself thinking about running again lately, I knew I was in trouble. My most recent foray into organised running was a series of trail races my sister and I did at the start of this year, but the longest of those was only four miles, so they weren't really that outlandish. Still, that's not how the pattern starts. The pattern starts with 'I'm feeling a bit podgy/unfit', then 'hmm, I'm sure I was thinner (and I was definitely fitter) when I was running a lot'. Then I go for an experimental run, and sometimes it sticks and sometimes it doesn't. This time against all my instincts I turned to the couch to 5k. I've avoided this so far - I've done two marathons and several triathlons and countless other races, so it feels rather demoralising to admit you're starting from the couch again. But you have to start where you are, and where I am definitely classes as 'couch'. So I've just started week four, and I'm already running faster than I did when I was marathon training. I'm actively looking forward to going out for a run (although with this scenery, that's not really surprising). Four weeks in is about that time in the cycle where I start being open to suggestion about entering a stupid race. So, it seems my sister and I have entered an ultra marathon. Don't worry, it's not a scary one, not really. It's an out and back route of just under ten miles, and you can do it as many times as you like until the time runs out. My longest marathon time is just under seven hours, and for this race we have fifteen. Easy peasy, and time for a nap in the middle too. Plus it's flat, whereas my runs round here most definitely are not. According to the cycle, I've probably got about three weeks of enthusiasm left before the novelty wears off, and I'm left with an inexplicable (and expensive) race entry for an event that fills me with equal amounts of dread and hilarity.
Wish me luck... |
Hello!Sit down and make yourself comfortable. I'm Jenni, and I write here about our new foray into country living, which includes growing food, knitting, baking, wandering around the fields, and seeing which local cafe serves the best cake. Categories
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