Week 22.2020 – challenge week

I’m calling it challenge week because it contained challenges for me and also because I am challenging myself. What does that all mean? Read on and find out.

This week’s yoga mood – negative. Much as I love James’ classes, I didn’t log in for the Monday morning class, it was a public holiday after all so why would I get up at 6.30am on a public holiday? On Wednesday I logged in for the challenging vinyasa class, and got through it again. That feels like victory. I’d booked for James again on Thursday morning, but didn’t make it after a rough night with interrupted sleep due to ongoing arm pain issues. On Friday I’d booked for Sarah’s gentle yoga class but cancelled, deciding instead to go for a walk after work instead to clear my head before the weekend. And after all, wasn’t I signed up for a workshop with Sarah on Saturday anyway? I wonder if I’m reaching the end of my enthusiasm for yoga. (If you can call my half-hearted attempts at regularly logging on and completing classes an enthusiasm.)

Gardening This week had a public holiday – taking advantage of the sunny day, this was my deadline to get into the garden and get that sunny side of the garden weeded and get all those baby plants out of their nursery pots and into the ground. Lots of bending over and digging is probably not the most sensible thing to go when you’ve got a sore arm and hand but I love gardening. If only my knees and hips and husband could cope with it, I’d be out there all day, every day. And to celebrate my pride in what’s going on, here are a few photos.

Walking We walked on Tuesday morning – as always combining with a little bit of food shopping, and as a bonus, one of the shops we went to had paracetamol. I was full of hope it would help with the pains in my arm. (Spoiler alert – it didn’t.) We also walked on Saturday, again, stopping to pick up some food, and a coffee from Mustapha at the Oasis Cafe. We realised we usually walk in a certain loop so on Saturday we walked the loop in reverse, which meant we saw some new street art that we had previously had our backs to.

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This week’s new food: Some new foods discovered this week. I tried overnight oats for the first time. Wow! It’s not disgusting at all. And it makes my weekday mornings so much easier. Cooked porridge takes so much time to make and eat. We bought a bunch of parsley to make falafel with, but only used half. In my search for what to do with the other half, I found out it was a major ingredient in chimmichurri sauce. So I made chimmichurri sauce from an amalgamation of recipes. I’ve never made chimmichurri sauce before. No idea if what I made tastes like the real thing, but now we just need to get steaks and a fine Malbec and we can pretend we’re in Argentina.

This week’s mood – emotional. It could be down to poor sleep from the ongoing arm pain (which wakes me most nights around 2am and 4am) but it seems I am crying at the least little thing. I’m looking at flowers to order for my colleague’s birthday and I want to start crying. Someone posts one of those Pooh-and-Piglet things on Facebook and I’m blubbing. Anything I see out there that has been designed to tug at my emotions, will do. I was sat at my desk crying on Tuesday morning before I started work because I read something moving on Facebook. I really hope this stops soon.

This week’s excitement – the rental house next door to us opened for viewings on Tuesday. There were 10 or so people in looking at the place so now we wait to see who will move in. Husband had a good view of people coming and going and who talked to the estate agent for the longest so he thinks it will be the first couple who viewed, but we’ll wait and see.

This week’s cultural activities: On Tuesday we did an online pub quiz with a friend of ours. It was a two hour post on youtube but the actual 50 questions of quizzing only took 50 minutes (we skipped forward through the blah blah). On Thursday and Friday night we watched Russell Mulcahy music videos. I was reminded that he was a major music video director while watching the Duran Duran documentary a few weeks ago. When we got to the end of the playlist (having skipped quite a few Elton John videos, sorry Elton) we watched a playlist of videos of The Who. My favourite was this one. Saturday night husband and I sat in separate rooms and watched different movies. So I finally got to see I, Tonya. A tough watch in parts. I hated that someone who was so driven and so talented was so abused in her personal life.

Family news: During our Family Zoom call on Friday my sister shared pictures of where I used to live. They sold the house last year some time because my mother had moved into a care home. The house has been bulldozed, the land has been subdivided and there are now two houses where once there was one. Fun fact: despite living in that house from the age of 13 to 23, when I dreamed about home, it was always the house I lived in before that. The only time I dreamed about that house was dreaming that it was destroyed by a falling tree in a storm. Make whatever assumptions about my subconscious from that you wish.

This week I have been listening to Carly Simon. I love her songs, the mix of sex and love and marriage and lust and sadness. And also some uplifting beauty. I’ve been using her as a soundtrack to my writing this week. Maybe this is why my characters have all been falling in love and breaking up and saying why they love each other.

Challenges: I have decided to push myself beyond the usual 750words daily writing challenge and have committed to #1000wordsofsummer which I read about in Viv Groskop’s weekly newsletter. Pushing myself to deliver an extra 250 words a day means the characters from my novel have a little bit more space to tell me things. Because one challenge is not enough, I’ve also signed up for this free challenge from Writers HQ. I never got very far with the Couch2 5K running programme so maybe I will commit more to something I actually like to do. I also want to work on my photographic technique, so why not add another challenge in the form of another free course, A Year with my Camera.

So as May comes to an end, I am looking forward to June being very busy and (hopefully) very productive.