3rd July 2020

The plants are outside now and coming along nicely. We’ve had a fair bit of rain over the last week so this tomato plant is now looking much bigger and greener. All the plants are!

I’ve also had a few disappointments. We have a lot of snails and slugs in a very small space, and they have thoroughly enjoyed feasting on some of the plants. The Basil plants have been totally eaten away to nothing. So have the lovely marigold plants that my daughter bought me. I won’t try planting either of those plants again.

My husband has been working from home for the last few months (due to Covid-19) and it made sense to give him my office space. As a result the rhythm of my days has changed, and my little garden has had much more attention than usual this year.

I went into town today because I needed to visit the bank and the post office. This is only the second time I’ve been there since the Lockdown began. I think it’s the first time I’ve been out of the house on my own for months. It was wet and windy (so town was quiet). On one level life was happening as usual, but look closer and things are very definitely different. There’s something that feels unnerving about the long, stretched out, queues outside the shops. I bought a cauliflower from the door of a shop we are no longer allowed to enter, the staff serving from behind a perspex screen across the door. The queue was too long at the butchers (to stand out in the rain), and I changed my mind about entering the small health food shop when I saw it was already far too busy inside.

Book of the day: George Orwell’s 1984

Lunch today was bacon, poached eggs, and mushrooms.

Dinner was gammon with broccoli and carrot & turnip mash.

On sunnier days, my neighbour’s cat spends the whole day asleep in the shade of my Buddleia bush. Oh to be a cat and to just laze and sleep all day long – guilt free!

30th April 2020

Tomatoes: Gardeners Delight

I love vegetable gardening but we don’t have the space. This year one of my neighbours has set a challenge, and a group of us are having fun growing what we can (in what we can). It hasn’t been easy to get hold of the seeds I’d like to plant but that might not be a bad thing because we really do only have a small space.

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Serendipity

Hello Everyone. How are you all coping with this weird world we’ve suddenly found ourselves living in?

This is me – dusting off my neglected blog space and allowing myself to meander and play.

I have lots of little random things that I feel inspired to share. Pockets of interest. Little rediscovered snippets of life.

Hopefully, at some point, I’ll get around to a full update.

Now let me see if I can find a random photograph…

[Serendipity: “finding something when looking for something else, thanks to an observant mind“.]

Five Years!

It is Five years ago, almost to the day, that I changed my eating habits. Over one weekend! On the Friday, I decided to follow a Paleo diet plan, on the Sunday I decided that I would start with a month of the Whole30. By Monday morning, the pantry was empty of all non-paleo foods and I had begun the Whole30 diet. I hadn’t even read the book at that point – I was just following the Whole30 food template from the website. I haven’t looked back.

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After the Hip Replacement – Catching Up

It’s been a while but I’m now starting to feel like writing again, in fact I’ve already started with a couple of tentative posts on Instagram. Instagram is so easy: an update just takes a sentence or two whereas writing a full blog post might still be beyond me – we’ll see.

I had the Hip Replacement operation in December, so I’m several months post-op. I’ll try to write about my hip replacement story in more detail at another time,  for now it is enough to say that I am recovering. Slowly. Definitely a slower recovery than I expected but overall the improvement is steady.

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Total Hip Replacement – 1

I have spent a couple of very busy weeks shopping for Christmas gifts for the people closest to me. I now only have a couple of days left to organise myself and get ready for the hospital and my hip replacement operation.

Before I have the operation I wanted to come on the blog and write about how I got here… about why I need a hip replacement.

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Hip Hop

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

I think that I’ve mentioned my painful hip before?

Well, in July I found out that I will need a total hip replacement and this totally silenced me. I didn’t know how to talk about it – didn’t really want to talk about it – but since the whole issue has occupied  100% of my brain it has been difficult to talk about anything else.

So there you are. I’ve said it out loud. Lets see if I can re-find my voice now, and continue onwards with this blog.

How to lose 100lbs – going through a rocky patch

Does my bum look big in this? (such an odd shaped shadow). The sky was blue, the sun was warm, but when we got to the beach the wind was bitterly ice cold so I was glad of the old fleece jacket I keep in the car for such occasions. It’s only four sizes too big for me now!

Now, getting to the point of this post – do you remember my “Accountability” blog post? Well things didn’t go quite as planned. I enthusiastically started following my new exercise plan, only to hit a brick wall when I had to face up to the fact that my pain isn’t something that I can program into my life. It is too varied, too unpredictable, and sometimes much more painful and disabling than I allow myself to believe (or pamper to).

Added to that, life can just be downright unpredictable, you might have visitors to stay, or maybe you fall and hurt yourself… maybe you get a cold bug and just want to sleep all day. So, the last few weeks haven’t been easy.

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