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.