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| He's got the look that I feel at the moment! |
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| on the outside... |
15th January 2018
Time to snuggle and stay warm! Brr!
I started the blog with gusto, lots of ideas and enthusiasm. One year in and I find myself a little bit disheartened. My MS isn’t terrible, but it definitely stops me from being Wonderwoman.
When I was a student, I always envisioned working and earning enough for holidays abroad, nice clothes, and a few treats a month and I find myself doing countless voluntary things, (on the PTA, school governor, running MSFriends lunches) and working not a lot (Invigilating maybe five times a month, I hate the uncertainty of that...) but life happens and it turns into Brexit.
I won’t start on that as I don’t like being called a remoaner, but I had a coffee break with our builder yesterday and he challenged my knowledge of the situation with some random numbers I hadn’t heard before about the reasons Leavers feel so aggrieved. Needless to say I now find myself less confident about my previous stance. However I still think they’ve (Maybot, Boris, Hunt, et al) mucked it up big time and we won’t know how badly till we are stuck in the pond gazing across the English Channel.
We nearly have an extension! The walls are up, and the roof will get started soon! Great chunks of concrete have been dug up and soakaway has been buried under thick Hertfordshire clay. We are doing it on a shoestring and deciding on fittings and kitchens bring home how much having my own money actually means to me. I worked from the age of 14 - yes, I really am that old - and was never a saver which is where the other half and I fail to find a middle ground... (But that wig for World Book Day will do wear Blue for the MSTrust MS Awareness day so it was ok to spend that £12.)
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| windows on our garden? |
As you can tell I have too much on the go, and I need to take time for Mindfulness and Calm, and plan some events I can attend and write about. I don’t think I will get a ticket to the Wellcome Trust talk about useful plants unfortunately as I need to see it and book it, not come across it and think about it.
I’ve had Gardeners World info in, and as much as I enjoyed last year, I have to find a way of paying for it and justifying running away on my birthday. 2017 was the year I paid a lot of money out, so 2018 has to be the opposite or the scales won’t balance.
I forgot to say as well that the brick barbecue disappeared in the skip! Yay! A layer of hardcore stands where it used to and I don’t know how easy I will find it to dig that up. I should have kept my eye on that ball, as mentioning car space led to hardcore everywhere the concrete was which I wasn’t actually hoping for. Builders and labourers are a little disparaging of plants I find...
I manage to hoover every other day, and thank heavens for Henry a friend donated to the building dust cause. (I forgot to mention that I ended up being ambulanced to Hospital after not being able to breathe. There were queues in A&E and I was sent home being told to avoid rooms being replastered.) Bring on the building work!
Snow has fallen across swathes of the country but we’ve just had rain. Cold it is but not cold enough yet. Fingers crossed we’ll stay outside of Narnia land and I’ll remain vertical on the school run. Soggy soil would mean it is easy to do some reconfiguring but I think I need to draw a plan... which takes us back into the annual cycle of this gardening blog once again.
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| soggy bottoms... |
Garden has had concrete dug up and giant crates formed the soakaway, and the brick barbecue has been taken to the skip... Now all we need is the Lottery win to extend our budget for the home office: Not going to happen otherwise! But I can continue to dream. My step on the scales this morning was another step in the right direction, and my new drug Tecfidera seems to be agreeing with me (when I remember my evening dose it’s getting closer to the 12hour gap) and despite having to eat something else with it, I am not resorting to junk food, so 2018 is looking a lot more positive. A birthday is coming up and the house being the state it is, it seemed like a good excuse for a Chinese meal, so I’m looking forward to that. But that’s officially February so I can blog again afterwards.
