This week was far more relaxing physically than the week before, but it still flew by pretty quickly which concerns me a little. I’m not very good at sitting still and being Mindful but I do my best to capture as much of that as I can throughout the day, I still may make that a bit more of a Mission for a while.

Monday: Doggy-sitting and post office visiting. We’re having a clearout and that involved me sending a shirt (via eBay) to Ireland. We never can say how our lives will connect with far flung, or not so far flung, places but it made me smile yet again to imagine something with my handwritting on it winging it’s way across the country.

Tuesday: Doggy-sitting (literally sitting…in the back garden with doggy paddling pools full, it’s very hot right now) then home to begin turning tiny buxus plants into tiny buxus bonsai trees. We’ve been watching a lot of Nigel Saunders on YouTube so our windowsills are full of trees growing (slowly, so, so slowly) from seed and cuttings we hope will survive to be transformed at some future date.

We’ve also treated ourselves to monkey puzzle tree seeds (all of which have sprouted…heaven knows where we’re gonna grow them!) and I have taken cuttings from my fuchsia which is always full of bees.

I know it’s a fairly common variety (Dollar Princess I think) but some plants sold by nurseries today are sterile and my heart would break to lose this plant, so I potted up five cuttings and it looks as if they have all taken. I’ll keep them in pots until we move from here, then into the ground they will go. (There is a plan that this place will be sold at some point, moving to somewhere with an enormous garden…yep, I’m not that fussed about what the house ends up being like, the garden is the important bit – and if and when that happens I may have to forwarn the buyers that their new garden will look a lot different when all of my pots are removed. I do have a lot of well established plants in the ground, but the plants that live in my heart too are all in very moveable pots).

Wednesday: Podcast listening and knitting. Almost the perfect day.

Thursday: MORE doggy-sitting and post office visiting, I don’t ‘alf get bout.

Friday: Courier drop off’s AND post office visiting, this selling stuff online malarkey could catch on y’know. I had a hairdressers appointment this afternoon, which in the time of Covid has become significantly rarer. I used to go every 8 weeks, to get the roots of my pink streaks re-done, but in the past 2 years I’ve been…twice. I’m not really a person who enjoys those sorts of social interactions but my hairdresser is a really lovely young woman who is also a single parent/self employed person and I want to support her as much as I can. She did, however, tell me off for pink streaking my own hair, although she also admitted that I’d done a good job (she taught me well) and now my hair is much shorter and no longer makes me look as if I’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.

Saturday: Doggy’s 2nd birthday! We celebrated at mine with dinner, dessert and 6 episodes of season one Ted Lasso. I have been bugging The Kid about watching it forever because it’s very good and she’s a big football fan (“UP THE VILLA!“) so because she and the dog were a captive audience on Saturday evening I got her as invested in it as I am (we’re waiting till season two has finished so we can binge them as we wish). I knew immediately that she was into the show, but one of the best bits was when the announcers discussed an incident at a Newcastle game a few years ago and she jumped up yelling that she had been at that match!

Dinner and dessert were also amazing (thanks Manjula and our in-house chef)

Sunday: I am a little stressed out because I need to book the car in for an MOT soon and so, of course, every small noise or weird wobble it has ever made has become thousands of pounds to fix in my mind, but I’ll face it and make any financial decisions based on reality, rather than the worst cases I can come up with. I was recently made aware of a mechanic who was told what’s what on Twitter after he’d moaned about not wanting to work on women’s cars because they’re always falling apart when they’re finally brought in. The most saliant reply I think was from someone pointing out that women would be far more likely to get checked what needs checking (on their cars, but now that I think about it, that probably also applies to their own health too) if they weren’t treated with contempt or spoken to as if they’re idiots by male mechanics(/doctors) all the time. I know from my own experiences over the last couple of decades that things have got a little beter, or maybe that’s just from the garages I frequent, but it is still a daunting task.