Rush rush

I’ve spoken to quite a few people recently, and maybe you’re experiencing the same thing, but it seems as if there are too many things to do in a day and not enough day to do them in.  Yes, I am aware that I generally live my life in this state, but it seems to me as if the volume has been turned up on it all over the last couple of weeks.

I was chatting to one of my best friends in the car today after dropping not so small daughter off at her final briefing weekend before she heads to Japan in just over a fortnight’s time, and not only was I speaking to her on the phone (hands-free, of course), but a Saturday morning was the only time we’d found in a few weeks – and whilst I was driving! – to catch up.  Usually, we chat every week over a brew, but recently, that’s fallen by the wayside and we found ourselves agreeing that we’re not quite sure why, but there just seems to be so much to do.  Clearly, I should have lived in an era when I had staff … although then there would have been no blogs, no phones to catch up with friends and generally not much of anything for women to do except fizz with the injustice of living in a man’s world, so perhaps I’m better off where I am 🙂

Anyway, grumble over, let me show you what I can see out of my kitchen window …

I adore passionflowers.  They’re my favourite flowers next to poppies and I’ve never really managed to grow them since we’ve lived here – and that’s 20 years this summer!  I’ve lost count of the number of plants that I’ve bought and lost, so these are special flowers as they are actually flowering, and I’m hoping that I’ve got them in a sheltered enough space for them to survive the winter.  I did notice that something’s been munching at the lower leaves so I may have to try to protect the main stem so that doesn’t get chewed.

There is a religious story to go with the flowers if you like that kind of thing, but I love them because of what they are – showy, exotic and purple!  They were growing intertwined with jasmine at the place that my husband and I stayed for our honeymoon and although I did like them before that, the place and the occasion has cemented them firmly into my heart and there will always be space for them in my garden.

I planted this climber around the sheltered side of the shed as that’s where I’ve got our garden chairs this year – I did a lot of clearing out of overgrown winter jasmine and other leafy climbers to make the space to sit.  The idea was that I’d be able to work outside and at least get some fresh air, and I did do that for those few weeks when we had the unbroken sunshine a short while ago.  It’s been a bit rainy since, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that sitting outside with a laptop in the rain, even under an umbrella, is not going to end well!

I’ve been doing a lot of behind the scenes blog stuff this week.  There was a problem with ad blockers and the GDPR notice that I have to have on the blog which was stopping people getting onto the blog to read the posts, but that should have been fixed now.  There was a problem with the RSS feed so if you usually pick up these posts through something like Feedly or Bloglovin then you won’t have been able to since the beginning of the year, but that’s fixed now too.  I have a love-hate relationship with the ads on the blog: they’re a valuable source of income to help with the blog running costs but I know that other people have a love-hate relationship with them too, so I always worry that there are too many.  The ad company I work with uses AI to determine how someone interacts with ads so in theory, you should never see more of them than you think is acceptable, but I still over-worry about how many that is!  I’ve disabled a few of them recently to try to help with some page speed loading issues so you might have noticed that – but equally, thanks to the AI, you might not! 🙂

I think the problem with these rushed weeks, and maybe they are something that everyone with children who are close to finishing or have already finished school and college for the year experience as we do our best to clear out our in-trays before our routines change, is that it’s so easy to forget what you did only hours before, never mind yesterday.  Writing the blog definitely helps as I want to have something to show you, but unfortunately for my camera roll, this week I have done lots of accounts work, driven a lot of miles with not so small daughter as she’s missed trains or trains have been cancelled or the timing of public transport just didn’t work, and saved Astrid the cat from losing another of her nine lives as she did one of those curly wurly showing-off- her-tummy cat stretches and fell off the stairs.  Luckily, I managed to grab her just as she disappeared over the edge but it wasn’t an elegant or careful grab and she was very offended.  You’d think I’d pushed her from the dirty looks I got – so ungrateful! 🙂

Even the walks with the dog have been squeezed in, although from these photos you can see why we had a need to hurry!

I stopped to take the last photo as the clouds at the bottom looked just like a human face with a tiny dragon next to it but they may have moved a bit as those big black clouds were coming in fast!  This is the barley that was crackling in last week’s post – it won’t be long now before the combine harvester is out in these fields.

I like looking for shapes in the clouds.  Years ago, I took this one on the way home from somewhere – it looked so amazing that I actually stopped the car to get out and take it.  We thought it looked just like a phoenix, and much like when you see or read something and think “I needed that today”, this cloud formation arrived at just the right time.  I don’t pray for help with things but I will ask the Universe in general and say thank you in advance as I know that the answer to what I need will come – I’m just not always very good at picking up on signs so it’s a family joke that something needs to be really obvious before I see it and this was pretty obvious! 🙂

I don’t have anything to show you on the knitting front this week – there’s been no progress with any of my projects because although I can have my Emergency Sock in the car, it’s not actually safe for me to drive and knit at the same time 🙂

Not so small daughter has all the yarn news this week as there were purchases made …

I don’t know what to tell you.  The sock knitter’s daughter has discovered crochet and being a strong-willed child (no idea where she gets that from), is not being swayed from her mission to learn how to use the hook instead of the pointy sticks.  Despite having a couple of friends who are expert crocheters and produce their own blanket and toy and houseplant patterns, not so small daughter is finding it easier to learn via YouTube video as she’s a left-hander wanting to crochet right-handed (we had a chat about this and my view was that if it made no difference to her, she’d find more right-handed people to help her if she got stuck).  Once she’s confident with the stitches, though, I think she’ll be able to look at patterns and understand them without any problems … and there’s still plenty of time to grind her down encourage her to knit socks!

And now, it’s Saturday afternoon and I am determined not to rush the rest of the day.  I’m going to make a brew, make some lunch and sit down for a bit.  I might even do some knitting – although I’d better be careful or this might become a habit! 🙂