Too much to do

You know that feeling where there's a whole lot of things you need to /want to do, but there's not a lot of time to do them in and you're begin to feel just a little bit overwhelmed.  Well that's me right now and I'm not really enjoying it. 

If I'm honest I could probably get a lot more done if I organised myself a bit better and didn't do a lot of the sitting around not really doing anything that has become my normal mode.  However, getting up the motivation to put my long-term gains over the easier, more appealing short-term gains has been particularly difficult recently.  It's time to make some changes, or at least some updates, to help me actually get where I'm wanting to go.

The first thing I need to do is have a look at my goals again to remind myself why I'm doing all this and what it is I actually want.  It could be that I actually decide that some of them are no longer right for me, in which case I can put them to one side, but for the others I just need a reminder as to why I want to do these things.  It might be a good idea to put up some pictures and photos around the flat as a visual reminder to help keep me motivated as well.

One thing I'm already doing now is that I've decided to reduce the hours I do at work, only by one day at the moment but we'll see how it goes.  This may seem a little bit counter intuitive as one of our goals is to save up money and to do things like learn how to surf and sail.  However, I do also want to spend more time with family at the moment and this help with that.  It'll also give me more time to research and pursue other forms of income that could actually earn us more and give us more financial stability and flexibility in the long run.  This extra time is also going to make me less stressed and less stress means less comfort eating, which means a little less spending money.

Which brings me onto spending a little more time in making sure I'm eating properly.  Firstly because that would be a good way of ensuring we're saving money as one of our biggest spends is on snack foods and take-aways /eating out.  But it would also mean that I'd have more energy to do all the things I want to do as the relatively high sugar diet I have right now is not exactly one that fills you with lasting energy.  If I'm honest I'm not really a fan of preparing food, I've basically lost all the enthusiasm I use to have for it, but the long term gain will be worth it.

The next thing that is important is that I need to properly organise my free time.  At the moment I have a list of tasks I need to do and the days I would like to do them on, but nothing more than that.  What usually happens is that when I come home from work I just space out for about 30 minutes if not more, than shower, eat, and then try and fit everything in to the time that is left usually leading to me going to bed late.  Not getting enough sleep is definitely a had thing and the doing nothing at the start of the evening also sets the mood I'm in for the rest of that time.  If I had a set schedule and got on with things as soon as I got home I would actually get a lot more done.  The same is also true for days on the weekend when Ed is at work.  This time gives me an opportunity to get more things done, especially if I schedule it out properly.  So far all I've actually done is not a lot and then again try to fit everything into a very small amount of time.  The scheduling would also mean I should be able to fit in things like reading and writing in my diary.  Things that I always want to do but never get round to doing.

And all this organising and scheduling will mean one very important thing.  That I will be able to have time to properly relax.  Even though right now I'm doing a lot of nothing, there's always the knowledge that I should actually be doing something so it's not actually as relaxing as it should be and there's always just a little bit of guilt involved.  By scheduling and actually doing all the things before hand I can then relax properly, go for walks, read a book, do my crafting, and actually enjoy doing these things properly.

So that's the plan.  Already I can feel a part of me that just can't be bothered and wants to put it off stirring.  The temptation is very strong, but it's not going to get me anywhere.  I need to make a choice between the immediate me or the future me enjoying the life I'm planning for.  I know which one I'd actually prefer, I just need to put in the effect to get there.

Walking: Princetown - Abbot's Way circular walk

Last weekend was my birthday and I decided that, as I was going to be spending it in my own, I would go for a long walk on Dartmoor.  Partly because I wanted to go somewhere beautiful and outside to celebrate and partly because I wanted to test myself.  I've noticed recently that I am feeling less confident in myself and what has been particularly weird for me is that I've really noticed it when I've been outdoors.  As being in the middle of nowhere is normally where I'm happiest it's important for me to fix this and one of the ways of doing this is to get myself out of my comfort zone.

The original plan was to do the longest walk in the Wild Swimming Walks Dartmoor and South Devon book, but when we were researching the parking situation Ed found out that they had had to close the car park due to overuse and damage to the surrounding vegetation.  It also turned out, when I looked at the route more closely, that we had done most of the walk already so I'd just be going over the same ground.  So a new route was needed and I decided I would plot my own.  I have the OS Maps app on my phone so it was pretty easy to plot a route that would be about a 5 hour walk and, because it's me, I wanted to pick a route that would need some orienteering to ensure I stayed on route.  I am a little rusty on that front and wanted to practice, but this rustiness definitely showed itself later in the walk.

I parked at main car park in the centre of Princetown and headed up the bridleway (called Jobber's Road on some maps) towards the South Hessary Tor and onto Nun's Cross farm.  It was at this point where I got of the main track and followed the route south east on a dog legged path that becomes Abbot's Way.  Part of this path didn't always seem particularly obvious, but it was easy enough to get a bearing and following in the right direction until it became more obvious again just before Plym Ford.  As it had been dry and pretty hot for most of that week the ground was pretty dry which did make it a lot easier to walk on than it might otherwise have been.  I always love looking at some of the odd names given to some of the areas on the map and at one point the path went between Great Gnats' Head and Little Gnats'Head.  Though thankfully there were no actual gnats there.

Up to this point I was pretty happy.  The weather was good, my legs felt strong, I had managed to navigate myself pretty well, I could hear sky larks, and apart from a few people in the distance I hadn't really come across another human being.  But it then went just a little bit off.  I had gotten to the head of Erme River, crossed over the ford and was looking for the path that basically goes directly north when I realised I had gone a little bit too far east.  My instinct was to retrace my steps to find the right location but for some reason I decided to override this and take a bearing that would have, theoretically, gotten me back on the path further up.  Needless to say it didn't, probably because at that point there weren't any distinctive features I could use to aim at and this meant that I drifted more east than before.  

I carried on much longer than I should have done, even though I was also checking my location on the OS Maps app.  However, once it became clear that I was really far off the mark and that I was getting into some pretty dangerous terrain I decided to stop being an idiot and cut directly west which I knew would mean I would find some features I could use to properly navigate from.  I was lucky that it had been so dry otherwise it could have turned out far worse than it had.  Although, if it had been much wetter I probably would have turned back sooner.

Thankfully it wasn't too long before I saw Fox Tor which gave me something to head towards.  However,  whilst seeing that was a mood lifter it was still a lot of work to get there and my legs where getting a real work out at this point.  It was a real joy to actually get to Fox Tor, sit on one of the stones, put on some layers, relax, and eat some lunch.  Once there I got my bearings properly and worked out what I wanted to do next.  The original plan was to to follow the path down into Foxtor Mires to Whiteworks and then walk west back onto the bridleway that would take me back to Princetown.  However, that route would mean walking through more mire and looking at it from above the path wasn't particularly obvious.  I decided I'd had enough of that for the day and that instead I would follow the old stone wall just below the Tor west which would take me to a path that would lead back to Nun's Cross farm and onto the bridleway much sooner.  This was a much safer route.

Despite getting lost on the second half of the walk I did still enjoy myself, mostly because I had been outside on my own in good weather doing something I really enjoy.  It was a very good reminder though to be much more careful when I'm outside.  Had the conditions been wetter and the mist come down I could have been in a much more dangerous situation.  I've learnt my lesson and will bear this in mind the next time I'm out navigating in wilder places.  

As for my confidence, well weirdly it hasn't dented it.  My initial instinct was actually right and, ironically, I should have had the confidence to just follow it.  I would have been in a much better situation if I had.  It's also weird how calm I stayed despite being in a situation where it would have been perfectly normal to panic.  I was aware that panicking was a possibility, but my brain remained completely calm which, in the end, allowed me to logically get myself out of the situation, and it was a good reminder to myself that that's how I react to these situations.  In fact, I now want to get out much more to do these walks and to get a lot more practice in orienteering.  Though next time I might take my OS map instead of my Harvey map despite it being bulkier and fiddly to use as it has a lot more detail on it to navigate from - at least until I get back into the swing of things.  Oh, and I have made the intended route public on the OS Maps app if anyone else wants to give it a go.

Walking: Sharrah Pool Circular

We made a plan to go walking and swimming whenever we had a day off together (and didn't have errands we couldn't put off) and when that day came we decided to do a short walk which included a wild swim to get us started.  This was the Sharrah pool circular walk in the Wild Swimming Walks: Dartmoor and South Devon book.  

I'm not going to go too much into the details of the route as it's already in the book, but it's a 4 miles circular walk that takes you through some ancient woodland along side the River Dart and a little bit of the open Moors.

We were a little bit lazy in the morning and so didn't get to the starting point, New bridge car park, until late morning.  Which unsurprisingly meant that the free car parking was full and as we didn't have any change on us for the other car park we decided to change our plans and drove to Holne, one of the stops on the walk, to find a parking spot there.  Normally I wouldn't park in a small village like that as I don't like taking up parking spots the residents would normally use, but as we planned on eating lunch there it felt like it would be okay.  We then started the circuit from there instead.

The start of the walk was predominantly in the woods and I'd almost forgot how nice, cool, and peaceful it is to walk through woodland.  The smell always makes me feel like the air I'm breathing is really clean, which is a nice feeling even if not necessarily true.  This part of the walk was pretty easy, though there is a bit of a hill half way along, and it felt like we'd been walking no time at all when we reached the pools.

It's been a while since I've been wild swimming and I will have to admit that getting into the cold water was a bit of a shock to the system.  I really need to increase my wild swimming so that I can get use to this again and it might also be a good idea to stop having scolding hot showers every night as well 😂.  Despite the cold at the time and the slight struggle to keep my breathing in check when swimming, it did feel really good afterwards and was worth all the discomfort.

It did take us a little bit of a while to find the path that goes straight up the hill and out of the gorge, and if you were still feeling a little bit cold after the swim the incline of this section will definitely heat you up again.  Once you've reached Bench Tor you get a good view of the gorge and some of Dartmoor, which made us wonder if we could actually do a larger loop that would include the other side of the gorge (turns out you can and we'll be trying that out in the not so distant future).  

Unfortunately you only get to walk a little bit in the open moor surrounded by coconut scented gorse before you have to walk along the road back to Holne.  It's never a good way to end a walk and I can see why the original plan has you walking through a section of woodland before you're back to the car park.  However, it did mean that we ended the walk at the Church House Inn for a lovely, and it was lovely, pub meal and a stroke of the even more lovely pub dog Guinness.

This was definitely a lovely way to start walking and wild swimming again.  The legs got a good stretch, I got a nice reminder (if I needed one) of why I love walking and wild swimming, and I got some useful information like I'm not great with cold water anymore and my legs are no longer used to walking up very steep hills - at least for now.  More practice is needed and, with that in mind, there are more walks planned.

May 2022 Budget

It's been a little while now since I've been able to say that our finances are going well, but finally we have a month were we can.  This has been partly helped by me doing my tax returns early this year (I put money aside after every pay to cover my taxes at the end of the financial year, but I don't usually have to send all of it to the HMRC), the £150 we all got back from our Council Tax, and my husband having a full time job again - at least for now.  So, we're making the most of it whilst we can.

Our credit cards and personal emergency funds are still going strong, and we've managed to put some more money into our savings account.  It looks really unlikely that we'll reach our goal saving half of this emergency fund by the end of June, but we did have to use the savings to cover our bills after Ed lost his job and that is exactly what this saving is for.

I did use some of my tax return money to catch up on my pension payments so that's now fully paid up to the end of May.  This makes me very happy.  I also used some of the money to get out joint account back up to cover next month's general bills, so that was another worry off mind as well.

We've been pretty good on our spending on food, takeaways/eating out, and general spending, though I did spend some money on replacing an items of Ed's which was very important to him but unfortunately broke.  We do need to keep on improving on this though if we're going to reach our savings goals for 2022.

So, everything went much better this month compared to April, or in fact March, and it definitely made me glad that I'd been sensible and put aside that money every pay day.   Though we are in a much better place at the moment with both of us working full time jobs, we are very aware that the cost of everything is going up still, in some cases by quite a lot, so we're going to need to be very careful with our spending from now.  This is especially true as all predictions show that it's only going to get worse as we move into winter - oh joy.  At least this month has been a win and has set us up nicely for the months to come.

Walking in 2022

Now that things have finally quietened down a bit it's time to get back to something we love doing, walking.  My husband also now has a full time job again, at least for now, so we have a little bit of extra money coming in to do more with - not that walking is a particularly expensive hobby.  The only issue is that my work is Monday to Friday and his is shift work, so we don't have a large number of days where we are actually off together.  To work around this we're planning on organising the walks we're wanting to do as much as possible so that when a day comes that we do have off together we can just get up and do them.

Devon's Coast to Coast /Two Moors Way

This one didn't exactly go to plan the last time we attempted it, but we do really want to give this walk another go possibly in summer.  However, we'll probably give ourselves a little bit longer to do it this time round so that we putting less strain on our bodies and are less likely to injure ourselves.  We have a bit more time this time to prepare for it as well, so that'll probably mean that we actually need to take less stuff with us.  I'm really looking forward to this as it's been a while since I've done a long walk and these legs could do with a good stretch.  At least we have all the equipment we need, all tested as well, so we don't need to buy anything extra for it.

Walks with Wild Swimming

We brought a book a while ago which had some walks in Devon with wild swimming attached to them, but are yet to do any of them.  As wild swimming is something we want to get into more that is something we really need to remedy.  There are a few that are pretty close to us, including one at Ivybridge and one at Noss Mayo, and the walks are mostly pretty short so it shouldn't be too difficult to get these done.  We also want to get more wild swimming in in general, but that we can do much closer to home and even do it on mornings when my husband starts work at lunch time.

Dartmoor

As we're so close to this moor it seems really silly that we haven't spent more time wondering around it.  This is one where I need want to do a little bit more research as the map we have of it isn't the best at showing where the actual footpaths are around Dartmoor.  I think there are a couple of wild swimming walks that are based in Dartmoor so that'll be a good start, but it's probably time to have a nosey through a good old OS map.

South West Coast Path

One of our main plans this year is to have more of an explore of the coast we're so close to in Devon.  As we have our book on the South West Coast Path this seems like the perfect way of actually do this.  We're not able to do all of this walk in one go, but will instead do the stages separately.  As each stage is obviously designed to be linear, we need to work out ways of returning to our starting point as we don't want to walk the path back again if we can help it.  This will probably mean public transport, unless we can find some circular routes in some places.  This'll also give us an excuse to venture into Cornwall, Somerset, and Dorset a little more.

I have to admit, usually when it comes to walking like this I don't really tend to (or like to) do too much planning.  I'm more of a decide on the day and go type of person.  However, we are really looking forward to getting back into walking again and this seems like the best way of doing it.  So soon, hopefully, we'll be out there breathing fresh air, stretching our legs, and getting the most out of where we live.

Visiting Guernsey

We had decided a long time ago that Guernsey was a place we really wanted to visit, so when it opened up again around the time we were booking our honeymoon it seemed like it was meant to be.  The fact that it was so close and we could take a ferry instead of flying was also bonus.  

We stayed in a shepherd hut at Camp de Reves, found by my husband, and it was perfect.  Just the right size (which also gave us an idea about the type of place we'd like to live in in the future), with a great view of the sea, perfect location for visiting all the sites we wanted to go to, and a lovely amount of privacy.

Our main aim of this trip was to relax and enjoy ourselves, but we did want to see the history of the island, get in as much walking as possible, and look at any crafting that was still happening there (this last one was mostly for me).  We went out most days, apart from the day I developed a nasty cold, but didn't cram any of them even though we probably could have seen everything in three days had we been inclined.  

Despite most of the things you hear about Guernsey being related to WWII, there's actually quite a bit of Napoleonic and prehistoric history there as well and we tried to see as much of the prehistory as we could.  They were mostly burial chambers that you could go into and I always find them fascinating.  It helped that everything was pretty easy to get to and it really didn't take long to drive anywhere - and by that I mean 30 minutes at the most, even with traffic.

In the week we were there we did manage to see a lot of monuments and historic structures.  However, my favourite part was the two walks we did along the south coast of the island.  Despite being so close to a built up areas, it was very peaceful and lacking in human noise.  The views out to sea were also very beautiful and quite a few of the plants were flowering.

There wasn't as much crafting to see as I had hoped, despite there being a 5 ply wool yarn that is a Guernsey specific wool and a specific style of jumper.  I did manage to get some of this wool though and the pattern for the jumper which I'm going to make for my husband.  I did also buy a hand woven basket that had been made locally and that I'm going to put my knitting projects into.  I could even use it to carry them around whilst knitting if I ever get the urge.  It's absolutely beautiful and I can see it lasting for years.

The good things about visiting Guernsey were how easy is was to get around and how quickly you could get to places even with a speed limit of 35 mph everywhere.  It also has a much slower pace so it was a lot easier to relax into our holiday, and everyone was very helpful when we had questions about things.  The food was also pretty good, even on the plant based front and that's usually where things can be a bit hit or miss.

There are always a couple of bad things no matter where you go and at Guernsey it was the cost of everything, which was a little bit more than on the mainland.  However, we were expecting that so it wasn't too much of a problem as we'd gone prepared.  There also wasn't as much wildlife as I had hoped, even a long the coastline.  To be fair, it was only April and the size of the island means that every available space is pretty much used up by humans so there aren't too many places wildlife can go.  However, I had hoped for a little bit more marine wildlife, but oh well.

Even with these couple of bad things we still really enjoyed our time in Guernsey, helped by the amazing weather we had, and we'd like to go back again at some point.  In fact, we enjoyed it so much we started talking about the possibility of actually moving there to live.  Right now we definitely don't have enough money to do that, but you never know there could be a moving to Guernsey blog in the future.

Doing a Whole Lot of Cleaning

As I put in my last post, the flat has become a bit of a disaster and definitely needs a reset /spring clean.  It also doesn't help that it's quite small, so any amount of mess looks bad.  I decided to bring back a cleaning method I use to use to help slowly bring the flat back into order, and that is the Fly Lady.

In its most basic set up, that I've taken anyway, you have a morning and evening routine that allows you to stay organised and keep clean the most used areas of your home.  Then there's the 'Weekly Home Blessing Hour' that is a cleaning routine you do to keep your home in a general state of cleanliness, as well as a rota of tasks you do on specific days during the week such as paying bills and organising a menu plan.  The last thing is the zone cleaning, which sees you tackling each room in the house for a week at a time and is where all the deep cleaning happens.  It's also when you do any decluttering that is needed.  

I'm not following this cleaning method exactly to the letter but have adapted it to fit what suits us right now.  Such as I don't really do the morning or evening routines and that means we need to add cleaning the bathroom to the weekly home blessing.  We also don't need to do a laundry load every day, which is just as well as the electricity bill would be massive if we did.  I have to admit that the weekly home blessing is something that my husband does rather than me.  I've been working more on the zones and we share tasks like the laundry.  

Before

Our flat isn't really separated into lots of rooms, so to do the zone cleaning I've separated the main living space into a hallway, bedroom, living room, and craft /office room and I'll just work through each area separately.  The idea here is to set your timer to 15 minutes a day and work your way through what the Fly Lady recommends you do in each zone to give it a deep clean, at least until you've worked out your own routine.  Once the 15 minutes are up you stop in that zone until the next day and if you don't complete every task by the end of the week you just leave them until the zone comes around again.

After

The first thing you actually do in each zone before the cleaning can begin is decluttering as there's no point in cleaning things that don't need to be there.  Even though we do declutter on a regular basis I have been surprised at just how much extra stuff I've been able to get rid of.  Obviously I'm only doing my things and our general items, I'm not touching any of my husband's things.  That's for him to go through.

Before

So far I've gone through the hallway, kitchen, bathroom, and office /craft room.  Even though the last two zones I'm yet to do are the ones that take up the main living area of the flat the space already feels to much better and more inviting.  The last two zones are actually the ones I'm most dreading and will probably be the most work, but they're probably also going to be the most satisfying to complete.

After

As with almost everything in life, the Fly Lady won't work for everyone and I've already started adapting it to fit our needs.  However, I do think the small amounts done on a regular basis works better for me than just going at everything in one go.  The whole idea here is if you do small amounts of work on a regular basis than your home will always look good and be clean.  Even though I've separated out the main living space into four separate zones right now, once we've got to the stage where we're now just maintaining it I will probably just treat them as one area to be cleaned all at the same time and give myself two weeks instead of one.  In the not so distant future the flat will be clean and tidy again and I'm looking forward to that moment very much.