Too lazy to switch on my laptop

So I'm going to do something I don't much like doing and post from my phone. Perhaps it will help me to be more concise. 

This week has been a bit up and down. I had my first online yoga class on Monday and once again was filled with horror (and shame) at how restricted my body is when it comes to movement. Mind you, when we did the first downward facing dog I thought I'd never manage (and that was my favourite the one other time I did yoga years ago), but it sort of worked. Getting out of it again was tough. But by the end of the hour, when we had done it four or five times, it actually was getting a bit better. So, not entirely hopeless. 

Similar to my experience with tai chi, I wasn't able to even pretend to flow from one movement to the next but I did my best with just stopping one thing and repositioning for the next. I've arranged with the yoga teacher to have a private one-on-one session so that she can actually see what I'm able to do and give me some advice on alternative movements and so on. I am feeling a bit proud of myself for that.

On Wednesday, for our optifast sport unit we walked to the river and then had to walk 20 minutes in one direction and then 20 minutes back, trying to maintain the same pace. I was surprised that I was actually able to walk for 40 minutes in one go. Well, ok, I did have a two-minute break but I didn't sit down for it. I was feeling pretty stiff by the end, though. Between that 40 minutes and walking to and from the river, we walked for almost a full hour. 

I mean, on the one hand, I wouldn't have been able to do that three months ago. On the other, it did me no favours since my back (the lower right-hand side/hip that's been so much trouble the past couple of years) seized up a bit overnight and I ended up calling in sick to work. I stayed home on Friday as well - and am feeling very guilty about that because I feel like I probably could have pushed through it. But I just couldn't find the mental wherewithal. I know it was probably the right thing to do but still. The guilt. 

On the positive side, over the weekend, I've been productively pottering and it feels great to finally be far enough out of the hole of depression I was living in for over a year that I am just randomly doing things that have been lying around for ages. I even did my washing yesterday and was astonished at the fact that when I thought about doing it, less than an hour later the first wash was down in the machine. And it even included the bed clothes. I can't even count the number of weekends where I spent a substantial amount of time trying to convince myself to bring washing down and didn't manage to do it until two weeks later I was about to run out of clean knickers. So I'm not as lazy as I always hate myself for being. Depression really is a hell of an illness.

So, here are some little things for me to add to the list the next time I log in on a computer:

- Got the washing done and hung to dry on Saturday. Including bedclothes.

- Cut back the marjoram and the long dead sunflowers, dill and coriander AND brought the bucket straight down to the organic waste bin.

- Also brought down the glass from the photoframe I broke two weeks ago and put it in the glass bin.

- Aired duvet on clothes horse in front of wide open windows with the sun shining in

- Watered all the plants and even added seeweed extract fertiliser to the water.

- Signs of life from someone special.

- Set up sunrise alarm clock

- Thought about doing a face mask. And then did it.

* The photos are of my Dracaema Singularis. Couldn't figure out how to add captions to pictures in the app. 

Plans for the weekend

The week has flown by, another week full of activity. I discussed this a bit with my counsellor this morning and she's going to work on it with me over the next few months. I'm handling everything pretty well at the moment but the overwhelm never feels very far away and I'd really like to try and work on learning to catch it and pull back on doing so many things before it goes too far and I'm back to not being able to do much of anything at all. Having said that, I'm pretty sure I'm going to try going back to choir when the winter semester kicks off in a few weeks. 

Random photo of an interesting plant, Lithops gesinae or stone plant. That's not just a little orange flower growing in a stone, the whole thing is the plant.

 

This weekend I have some translating to do - about eight hours worth and I'd like to get most, if not all, of it done so that I don't need to worry about it on Monday after my first yoga session. I also want to finish painting the office, which I started a few weeks ago and have gone back to ignoring since. I've done the bulk of the hard work so I really need to get back and finish it. The corners and edges are finished up as high as I can reach myself so I just need to get on the ladder, fill in the foot or two above that and then get the roller out. 

And from a TOMM point of view, Saturday will have to be my Thursday. I realised yesterday that I am not going to have time on Thursday evenings to do anything at home since tai chi doesn't finish until after nine and I don't get home until about ten past ten. That's already a good hour and a bit past my preferred bedtime and there is realistically very little chance I am ever going to feel like doing housework at that stage of the evening. Clearly, finding a half-an-hour every weekday evening for TOMM if I am also out every weekday evening is going to be challenging. I may need to sit down with a pen and paper and figure out exactly how I want to tackle it. It's mostly feeling like moving it, or at least most of it, to mornings before work will be the better option. That worked befores. Except on days I overslept. Some more ruminating is needed, methinks.

Dust as far as the eye can see

Housekeeping has been a very sore spot for a long time now. I was delighted to find The Organised Mum Method and app and I have used it more consistently that just about any other plan I ever came up with. However, after a good burst of starting to get back to it earlier this year, my back was so sore that I did nothing for a couple of months. Looking back through my app history I can see that I actually started on 14 November 2020 and kept going up to 31 March 2021. Then I picked it up again from 24 April to 25 May. That is more than I thought I had done. And on some days I even finished everything on the list. So, the background clutter wasn't really getting touched, but the day-to-day was getting done and no new clutter being added. 

Bits and bobs from shelves/window sill etc. in the bedroom

 At any rate, in mid-June I contacted the concierge service offered by work and asked them to find me a cleaning lady to come and do a deep clean. Unfortunately, I kept expecting it to be "any day now" and it ended up taking them a couple of months. Since my back was still pretty bad and I was generally feeling overwhelmed and not able to anything, I've just been letting the dust gather and doing just enough to maintain some basic hygiene in the bathroom and kitchen at least. 

Finally, on Sunday, after having the date moved twice, someone came and spent about four and a half hours cleaning. She was supposed to be there for five but after three hours I was already feeling very uncomfortable having someone I didn't know in MY SPACE, so I chopped a few things off the planned list and she left after four and a half hours. She seemed to think by the time she left that we were great friends, whereas I had landed more on the side of hope-to-never-see-you-again. A kind of strange person, not the best cleaner, but she did manage to deal with an awful lot of dust and I am managing to calm down a bit two days later and just appreciate the fact that she dusted things that I haven't even looked at for months or years.

The space in front of the dresser was full with boxes and bags of stuff - literally up to the drawers and about as far out as that black stool. You can see the marks in the dust!

It also forced me to deal with some of that background clutter. Now, I didn't manage to actually declutter and sort everything, but I did move most of it over to my other apartment/office. I will try to finish painting that this weekend and then start tackling the piles of bags and boxes one at a time. After already renting it for more than a year, it's time I had more than just one lonely table and chair in there! While the cleaner was here on Sunday, I mostly tried tackling my writing desk, which has become yet another incarnation of the Table of Doom. 

Bits and bobs from sitting room

I did loads of sorting, gathered a big bag of paper to recyle, almost filled six plastic boxes, and it still looks very much like a Table of Doom. So the plan is to first finish painting the office, but also to spend any spare TOMM time working on clearing my writing desk. I'll be most likely reverting to my old scheme of 3 Little Things to get it done. I started with the boxes of stuff that were lying around on shelves or window sills or the tops of cupboards and am making some good progress so far.

When it is all done, I can move the writing desk, and a small set of shelves and drawers over to the office, which will give me loads of space in my sitting room. I'd like to move the table down towards the window but can't quite decide where to move the couch to in order to get that done. We'll see.