Write_Good: a safe haven for concrit

I have reviewed my ALL THE THINGS LIST and still think I can make real gains before the end of the year.

#ORJENISE100 carrying on and will complete in October. My space feels a little lighter even though I only got through half the prompts. Worth completing!

HOME: spent most of last week at the cottage - left home at 4:15am Monday morning when the roads were quiet and was in Tesco's in Bangor by 9:30am which is pretty impressive. For comparison left the cottage at 3:15pm on Friday and got home at 9:30pm. It was lovely to have the time away even though working. I got a tiny bit of gardening done, the cats travelled well and I now have another list of things to sort out when next up there at the end of the month! Back at the flat I have blitzed my kitchen, hall/landing/stairs and bathroom clean and am about to start on the chaos of my bedroom.

HEALTH: knees still aching - possibly as a result of long drive Friday. Need to get flu shot booked in this month and debating whether to pay for Covid shot as it seems to be doing the rounds at work.

LIFE ADMIN: hold onto your hats - I have started to check my current pension status. I've misplaced the login details to my Civil Service and Social Housing schemes so asked for those. The first part of my TLS scheme looks OK but I do need to find the second part after they switched suppliers. My Local Govt scheme is OK though I should increase my contributions or buy AVCs. Things seem a bit better than I expected and I'm glad TLS had a good scheme and I was able to have a few years adding 20% of my take home pay thanks to their matching policy. Why the sudden push? A seminar last week by the LGPS scheme which set out how much income you need for a basic or comfortable retirement which was, quite frankly, scary!

DIGITAL DECLUTTER: this is a combo of #orjenising things, getting my life admin sorted but also dedicating some time to dealing with the massive amount of stuff I have digitally. I have multiple of email accounts - there's my main one, a back up and my fandom related one just on the top of the pile. I'd had my main Gmail since the early 2000s and there was (last year) over 35,000 emails in there plus a G:drive full of docs. I've done a bit of dedicated sorting over the last few weeks and am down to just under 13,000 archived emails and transferring important things over to Dropbox. I've been unsubbing from mailing lists, or setting them up to my backup account (so I can have one account for Important Things and one for Everything Else) and it seems to be working. My back up account is in very good order. I hope to get to the fandom related account over Christmas. I also had over 1000 images on my phone - so many pics of cats, garden, allotment and epic amounts of screenshots. It'll probably take me most of October to sort those out and then I'm scheduling a monthly image review in my diary!

GARDENING/ALLOTMENTING: at the cottage I planted up some flower beds and cut backs the herbs. I Still have remaining winter pots to plant at the flat, as well as sorting out a load of new house plants and the allotment. It's been too wild to do much outside the last two days (thanks to Storm Amy) but may try to work from home on Wednesday and take a long lunch break to finish the winter pots.

COOKING/EATING: ate like a queen at the cottage - duck breasts, sea bass and ribeye steak were features of the week away. Decent meals every evening and lovely lunches and I ate pretty much everything I bought plus a lot of the fruit/veg I took with me. Also discovered I really like persimmons. Cancelled the Oddbox which should have arrived on Friday as I still had plenty of fruit and veg at home so have time to eat down my courgette, onion and potato gluts as well as empty the fruit bowl. About to make a big pot of something to feed me for a few days and then either a Thai green curry or Keralan Prawn curry midweek.

READING/LISTENING: Not reading/ listening at the moment - been too busy!

WATCHING: dumping a lot of my viewing as the autumn shows are coming back I find myself oddly lacking in enthusiasm to watch them. I signed up for a free trial of Acorn TV and blitzed my way through the two most recent seasons of Whistable Pearl and then all four seasons of Harry Wild. Might keep it for one more month then cancel. Have cancelled Disney+ - meant to do it for ages but the recent debacle was the final straw.

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

CATS: all good. They travelled very well to the cottage and the passenger seat of the car is now covered in cat hair.

VOLUNTEERING: recent committee meeting was short and productive. The only task I have arising from it is to be around on the morning of Friday 24 for a skip drop off and be present on Saturday 25 that for a work day. Which means I should be free Sunday 25 to drive to the cottage.

SOCIALISING: not last week.

WORK: still hoping October may be a bit quieter than March through September have been! Though this coming week looks full on but the following two might be easing off a bit especially with the new way of doing inspections agreed at the last reps meeting.

Plans for this afternoon include my bedroom, cooking, and sorting house plants. If the wind drops possibly a little bit of tidying the front garden.

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.