Ephemera & Tales

Backdating this to 1st Oct because I meant to post before bed and forgot!

The world is on fire everywhere and I'm mostly continuing to deal with that via Twitter, Threads and Instagram and trying to keep over here focused on the good things or attempts to do good things.

On that note

I signed up for Action for Happiness's Optimistic October and the task for day 1 was to write down 3 things you're looking forward to this month so mine are:

1. Seeing two films which are part of the BFI film festival with ravurian on 18 and 19 October.

2. Our community work day at my allotment site on 25 October

3. Coming back to the cottage at the end of this month to work a week remotely again.

Having only managed half the prompts in the September round of #orjenise100 on Insta I'll be carrying on through October. However 183 items left my flat so I'm counting it a success. As well as picking up the missing prompts I'm also looking at bitesizedcleaning's Organisational October challenge. The task for the 1st October was to make a plan and I'm using my ever evolving To Do List for that!

And I've transformed Project 65 days (do as much as I can of my To Do's by end of Sept) into Project 92 days (keep going until end of December) and plan to do at least 4 things a day which are either tasks from To Do List or are part of Optimistic/Organisational October.

On that note yesterday:

1. I organised and deleted email from a couple of subfolders on my main email account. Now down to a total of 14,792 emails, 14,700 of which are archived in subfolders. Down from over 35,000 last year so it is progress!

2. Cleared up my free Canva account so I can see the images I really need and deleted the rest.

3. As I'm here in Wales and away from London and the flat I did some gardening, sorting out two flowerbeds (cut back overgrown plants, planted some autumn colour and bulbs for spring) and cut back the herb bed.

4. Signed 4 petitions - I already donate a healthy chunk of cash each month to a number of charities and would bankrupt myself if I threw cash at every deserving cause - but I do have time to sign petitions and write to my MP and councillors. So 4 petitions signed yesterday. Need to keep a proper track of these!

Small steps.

The last quarter of this year is approaching too fast and I still have ALL THE THINGS to do!

#ORJENISE100 it's been slow for me this round possibly because it's intersected with a still busy period at work. I'm still a few days behind and will keep a note of the prompts I've missed and catch up in October. By the end I should have removed at least 200 items from my home and I am making inroads into eating down food stores and using up the toiletries mountain.

HOME: chaos still reigns in my bedroom and living room but I'm hoping to start on the bedroom today and get the first coat of varnish on the back door. There may be a bit of gardening or houseplants potting accomplished too. The ex was at the cottage last week so I did several loads of washing at his and I plan on taking the remains of anything that needs washing up to the cottage with me and drop it off for a service wash up there! I have fallen somewhat behind on #Project65days so on 1 Oct it will become #Project92days to see how much of my To Do List I can clear before 1 January.

HEALTH: knees still not happy. Really need to bust out the physio exercises and do them again. Also need to clear enough space to be able to exercise at home over winter as I'm feeling very stiff and inflexible.

LIFE ADMIN: slowly picking away at long outstanding tasks like a grown ass adult.

GARDENING/ALLOTMENTING: still have remaining winter pots to plant and allotment to sort!

COOKING/EATING: I'm tackling the coffee mountain and have begun to make it at home to take into work. Judging by the last week we'll soon be in porridge/honey season which means I can start tackling the honey mountain. I'm meal planning for the days I'll be at the cottage (tomorrow Sunday evening to Friday morning) so will be taking fruit/veg from home as I have things to eat up. I seem to have a ridiculous amount of fruit at the moment and may postpone next week's Oddbox to allow me to catch up.

READING/LISTENING: Not reading/ listening at the moment - possibly will tackle an audio book on the drive to Wales tomorrow.

WATCHING: Autumn shows are starting to creep back into the schedules. Not sure whether I'll be picking all my usual ones up this year. Trying to back away from both Doom scrolling and mindless viewing a little bit.

CREATING/LEARNING: still here -> summer has been nuts at work so hardly any time for crochet club or other creative endeavours.

CATS: all good.

VOLUNTEERING: we've not resceduked to end of season barbie yet but we do have a committee meeting Monday.

SOCIALISING: I went out with the allotment group (reps from all the sites I manage after their meeting on Monday). Went for one drink left the pub as it closed. Oops. Also met up with some work colleagues on Thursday and we went to More Than Human at the Design Museum. Interesting and now I have loads more photos on my phone. Totally forgot Thursday was the last Thursday in the month and missed my monthly Zoom with 2 friends. Thought I has another week...

WORK: I was invited to the meeting of the reps allotment group on Monday - they know I am under resourced and several things have not been done in a timely manner over summer because of this. I think it's a testament to how well we gave worked together since '21 that the meeting was not "you haven't done this" (which was very much the tone when I joined) but rather "what can we do to help - how about X, Y and Z" where X is an idea so simple I should have thought of it before and Y and Z will massively simplify some key processes, lightening my load and keeping them happy. I'm really happy they've gone from a group who were very disgruntled and finger-pointy, to being a lot more collaborative and having their own plans to do interesting and useful things. There was also a productive meeting last week around the small site which is being reclaimed by the cemetery and where we have you move 19 plotholdrrs and 4 charities to alternative sites.

As I didn't get up to the cottage during my annual leave I've negotiated working remotely for some chunks of time over winter. Heading up there tomorrow until Friday so I can get some uninterrupted work time as well as possibly a couple of slightly longer lunch breaks to tidy the cottage garden. There are less distractions there so planning on reading in the evenings and having a couple of early nights.