Bear with ...

Good morning!

I hope you are fine and well on this rather humid Thursday (and it's still early!).  I'm popping in to tell you that I am in the process of transferring my blog posts over to my new platform this week and in the immortal words of Captain Oates, "I may be some time".

So, this is just to tell you not to worry, the blog isn't going anywhere, everything will stay online until it's all absolutely ready to be moved so if you're in the middle of knitting socks then the Sockalong tutorials won't vanish on you.  After this post, though, I probably won't post again until I've moved bloggy house (unless it all goes horribly wrong and takes even longer than I expect), so I'll see you on the other side!

And just because I can, here are some photos from the garden this morning.  Oh my, I don't know if it's the weather or because I did a lot of work in the garden earlier in the year, but I am so happy with how my borders are filling out this year!

See you soon! xxx

"Bear with ..." a quote from the character Tilly in the BBC TV show Miranda.  You can see Tilly in action here!

Our day out

We went out for the day yesterday.

Earlier last year, this would have been a perfectly normal thing for us to - in fact, the most unusual thing about it would have been that we'd managed to snag a day off for my husband who, like most self-employed people, works far too hard!

Now, thanks to the fact that we've all been restricted in what we can do for the last year or so, it was with HUGE excitement that we loaded the four of us and the dog into the car and set off for a day out in Wales.  

We certainly weren't the only ones and did think for a while that our day out would extend to sitting on the M56 for the entire time, but soon we were able to lose the worst of the traffic and oh my life, it was so good to be going somewhere just for the fun of it!  Fun!  Ha - after my Monthly Musing last month, here we were on a day out Just for Fun - and it felt AmAzInG!

This is where we ended up after what had become a bit of a road trip - just because we could! - to see some of the places we had missed.  This is Rhos-on-Sea and we like it here because the dog can go onto the beach and there's a really good kiosk cafe on the prom 😀

Monthly Musing - May 2021 - Bring the fun back

“So what have you done that’s fun recently? 

I was chatting to one of my oldest friends on the phone - not oldest in years but in the length of time that I have known her.  We met in our twenties (on my honeymoon, actually!) but we have still grown up together, and even after all these years, when she knows me so very well (or perhaps because she does!), she still manages to ask me a question from time to time that makes me think for the rest of the day.

 

It sounded a simple enough question – we’d exhausted the family updates and the immediate news – but it absolutely stopped me in my tracks.  In fact, it stopped me for so long that I think she thought we had lost our connection, but the simple answer in the end was

 

“Nothing.”

 

To qualify this statement, we were chatting before the lockdown restrictions had started to lift and nobody was going anywhere to have any kind of fun, so there was a certain inevitability about what I was going to say.  However, it made me realise that although I have had plenty of fun moments over the last few months around what I’ve been doing generally so I’ve not been living a life of dull misery, it has been a long time since I deliberately planned anything into my calendar that’s “just for fun”.  In fact, I probably did it more during the first lockdown because we were all more focussed on how we were going to get through those restricted days but now – well, now, this is how we live, isn’t it?  For so long, the restrictions have meant that for many people (our family included), we’ve just ended up working harder and for longer hours.  If we’re not careful, even when we’re allowed out without any restrictions again, we’ll have got out of the habit of doing things just to have fun and that’s no way for us to live.