An update post of allsorts

Wow I've been offline for weeks and now I'm in mega catch-up mode. So in order to stop me coming on to blogger every single day I'm just going to do one big update post - so please excuse the randomness.

The new house

I was planning on taking some photos of the house in the beautiful sunlight today but it seems to have taken to hiding behind the clouds so I can't update you on that. Then I was going to make some new cushion covers but couldn't decide how to do it. Then I was going to make my first attempt at a quilt but needed to wash the fabrics first. So I'm back online catching up whilst I wait for the washing machine to finish. So for now I'm going to leave you with some photos of the garden - just a few as I have so many I can keep some for before and after pictures later on.

First we started by covering and filling the boxes my parents brought for us to grow vegetables in. These are larger than your average stacking boxes as they are old ones my dad managed to get years ago. As you can see they were a hideous blue colour that just would not sit well in the garden, so my mum came up with the idea of wrapping them in green garden bags. But because the boxes were so large the bags didn't quite cover them, so a few bits of blue still peek through.

Once they were covered and filled with compost I got to planting seeds. I helped my dad plant his vegetable seeds in his garden couple of years ago but doing it in my own garden was so much more exciting (and scary because I so want them to succeed). My dad laughed at all the photos I took during the day but my mum reminded him of how proud he was of his first garden and home-grown vegetables and how she has the photos to prove it! Good old mum, eh?

We planted loads of seeds and have some left over to replace when we pick some of them (say the radishes) or to keep for next year. We planted: parsnips, beetroot, radishes, leeks (I spelt it leeeks on the label I was so excited lol), onions, spring onions, long carrots and small globe carrots, courgettes, tomatoes (a variety that will grow well outside in a grow bag), runner beans (to be planted outside after the frosts have gone - same with the tomatoes that currently sit on our windowsill), and strawberries. There is also an apple tree in the garden which I know had a fantastic crop last year and as we managed to get a free grow-bag yesterday we are planning on buying something else, preferably more fruit, to add to our home-grown goodness.

Here are the strawberries - well one plant - we managed to pick up two varieties by mistake but that is just as well because this one apparently fruits much earlier than the other one so we will be able to enjoy fresh strawberries (even if just one of two) at different times of the year!

After planting the vegetables we then planted pansies and primroses in the hanging baskets and the remaining ones along the front of the house amongst the daffodils and croci. Tim got an action shot of me wearing my dad's sunglasses (Tim broke mine by standing on them during our move so he still owes me a new pair lol). This reminds me of when I used to be underweight and tiny and how I'd look like a fly with big bug eyes if ever I borrowed my dad's glasses - thankfully I now have a slightly fuller face (even if it is still quite long and thin).

After that my dad and Tim (who was feeling a bit worse for wear having had a bit too much alcohol the night before - he actually didn't drink that much but it reacted badly with his antibiotics and he threw up loads poor darling) had to come up with a place to stick the bird box. We had planned to put it in the apple tree but then Kitty climbed up the trunk and we realised that this was NOT an option. So they decided to hang it on a plank of wood they then nailed to the top of the trellis by our shed and hear another tree we hang peanuts from. A blue tit went in to investigate that very same evening so we are hopeful we may have babies this year.

Kitty, however, having shown off her climbing skills then decided to lay in the middle of the lawn and bask in the sun whilst we did all the hard work - look at her, butter wouldn't melt and all that!!

This blog

I cannot decide whether to change my blog or not - when I started this blog it was an experiment, I didn't really have anything I particularly wanted to focus on. I loved reading family blogs and craft blogs and esecially homemaking blogs but I didn't really have anything in common with any of them. I've tried several blogs in that time - a few for my poetry and kids stories and some spiritual ones but this is the one that lasted and gradually I developed some friends who popped by. When I started blogging about endometriosis I discovered a lot of new friends but I didn't want to just have an "endoblog" because I still love sharing things with homemakers and crafters. I do not have much time to craft and make my house a home but I still enjoy sharing with them.

I also had a fairly successful Reiki blog but it became a challenge to keep it up - somebody else paid for the hosting and I felt I had to blog regularly (which I also felt here for quite some time) and I also felt it had to be worthwhile, not just random thoughts. I took a break from the Reiki blog ready for the move and now find the hosting has run out and I am still considering whether I want to get it renewed or not... part of me doesn't want to lose all the work and effort I put into it and I probably should have saved copies of what I put on there on my laptop but a bigger part of me feels it went out into the world and I don't need to hold on to the past. The older I get the less time I find I have and I just can't keep up all these online projects I could before and I don't like feeling tied to them.

Having said that I do love my blog here but I don't want to be tied to it - I need to remember it is an outlet rather than something I need to keep up to date all the time. There was a time when I was about the leave uni and after I graduated that I desperately wanted to be like so many of my blogging friends and work from home - but it never worked out - I never had the financial stability to do that (we barely survived last year when I was the main breadwinner). This week I am actually feeling quite down - although I love my job I have just become so weary through all we've been through and although I hate to admit it I have less energy and stamina than a lot of people because of the continued toll on my health and it is just so difficult to keep going - it has come to a head having spent some time at home, in the garden and seeing how beautiful it is and how much I am missing by being out of the house 12 hours a day and knowing that come April I will be working 6 days out of 7 every other week (2 of those days will be half days so I won't work more than 37.5 hours but the rota system means I am out 6 days a week on my weekend working patterns and the buses make my days extra long). This surprises me because when I started working there I realised I loved my job so much I felt I'd never want to leave, even if we had kids - but now I realise however much I love it, were I given the option to cut my hours and stay home more I would take it. I'll probably feel different again after my lap and when I get my energy levels back up again because I think it is just the exhaustion speaking right now.

So I really don't know what to do regarding the blog - do I keep it as a general blog - one where I post about absolutely anything in my life (after all "dream of living" is about life itself) or do I choose to just go in one direction... another thing that has been on my mind is that even though I have let the Reiki blog slip lately I have been doing a lot of spiritual seeking and have been talking in great depth to a Christian friend of mine about how "new age" beliefs and Christianity are not as different as they may initially seem - I have actually personally finally found the peace I was looking for - the fact I can choose to accept Jesus in my life without lying about who I am because I am not able to close my eyes and heart to new age spirituality yet I always felt the draw of Christianity - I never saw the way they could work together but now I do. My friend and I were talking about how there isn't really any literature out there about this - or rather there is but it is always very biased - one side is always showing the faults of the other and this happens from both sides! My friend then said I should write something based on my own experiences and although I don't feel near qualified enough to do this I have actually felt for several years now that my experiences, my searching for the connection between the two and the feeling I got when praying/meditating was that I was being led towards doing something like this. I didn't want to - I actually feared it for what it would bring into my life, but now I feel more like I want to express what I am finding out. That may sound totally presumptuous on my part but it is definately something I feel deep inside.

So again I wonder - do I bring spirituality to my blog? It is a deep part of my life after all. Or do I start another blog, one that combines new age and more traditional spirituality together, rather than one focussing only one one aspect - that of Reiki. Or do I not bother blogging about this at all? It makes more work for me - but writing is like therapy to me, I love to write. In fact a couple of years ago I starting handmaking books of my poetry but even then I separated my spiritual poetry from my other poems for fear of offending people or having questions asked - I wasn't ready for it. I wanted to build a life out of my writing - I wanted to inspire others as I had been inspired... I even held an online writers' group to inspire those who feared writing because they had been told previously they couldn't write. However much I love my job and have loved a lot of my roles I have always felt writing should be a part of it - in fact my dad is convinced I will publish something one day and I regularly had teachers commenting on this fact too. Very strange, but true. But at present I have to work to survive and I am so tired at the end of it - do I take up time writing more because after all it is pleasurable to me, or do I focus on other things... it's a hard decision for me to make. I would actually appreciate any comments from you guys about what you would like to read or what you think I would be good at. I may start a poll - in fact if you see a poll on m blog, please do take part and/or leave me a comment about this. There is so much I feel I have to give and so much I would love to write about but finding a direction is hard - do I focus on spirituality, endometriosis, home-life... or do I just write about whatever inspires me in the moment?

In fact I think I will go and set up a poll now - so please do take part :o) After that I am going to sit and cut out the articles from out Country Living magazines I have saved and put them into ringbinders in a style I will enjoy going back to again and again. I love creative projects and this is one I have wanted to do for months but never had the time for. Then hopefully tomorrow the sun will be back to its shining and I can sit outside and start that quilt!!

Have a lovely day

Amanda xx