Delightful Poppy, my last holiday house-sit dog.

It’s been way too long between posts, but rest assured that I have been fashioning a path through some rather overgrown torrain. It’s beginning to settle in my heart, that living the life I choose, is not so much choosing a life I want and then living it, but rather choosing the life I want, moment by moment. At the beginning of April I finally ran out of house-sits, and managed to book a – 3 nights on site, 2 nights off site – rolling plan for the following few weeks, only to find that I needed to be in Newcastle for longer periods, to cover staffing problems. I cancelled the site entirely last week and have had to cut my stay down to only two nights for the whole of next week too. This push back towards house-living meant taking a look at my internet access, since Pete doesn’t have Wifi, and uses his phone to tether his laptop. Not wanting to use up all his data allowance, I have now subscribed to the same arrangement, but with Three’s new 30GB hotspot package, so my internet issues are completely behind me (I hope!)

Having finished the book on Essentialism and considered my own need to at least be aware of my priorities, I feel much clearer about the importance of noticing when work begins to encroach on the rest of life. I broke life down into the following priority categories:

• Self,
• Family (in which I include Pete),
• Friends,
• Work (Custom Canine Care),
• Writing (which I am not calling work at the moment, because it is life-living and creative).

For most of the past four or five years, work has very much been the cuckoo that threw everyone else out of the nest, and then fed freely on my time, only to become enormous. A lot of my thoughts so far this year have centred on practical solutions to the problem of freeing myself from the day to day demands of the business. I want to keep Custom Canine Care running, not least because it provides a number of people, who are very dear to me, with work. But I do want my own contribution to become less, so that I can focus on other things. A couple of weeks ago, we had a staff meeting (the result of re-prioritising my co-workers in the business) to discuss this further and came up with a number of new ways forward. Typically, it has been the two weeks following on from this, that I’ve been needed to cover holidays and more recently, the death of Joe’s car. So as always – plans remain fluid, and sometimes work still needs to be prioritised!

My wolf print in snow tatoo

In respect of the other categories, I have finally set on a course of slow, steady weight losss, returning in the end to the high fat, low carb model, and that’s all going well, at a rate of about 1lb a week. I think it’s been so slow, because I have had a knee injury (now nearly healed) and haven’t been able too walk much without severe pain. I have also gained a tattoo! I went to a local tattooist, who Pete has used before, and who just happened to be across the road from the last house-sit that I did at the end of March. It’s on my upper right arm and is a wolf paw print. It felt odd for a while, but now feels like a part of me. A few people have asked me how it felt to get it done. The closest sensation I can liken it to is a kind of rasping across your skin – much as I imagine it would feel to run a metal file over the area in little back and forward strokes. It wasn’t so much really pain, as a kind of irritating soreness – but very hard to accurately explain.

Pete at the cheese and cider festival, The Brandling Villa

Prioritising family is a work in progress, though since Mum had the heart surgery in March, and I spent some time with both my lovely sisters (Fiona and Janet), I have definately felt more intertwined with their lives. I have moved all my website hosting over to Fiona’s long-standing hosting and web-maintenance business, and most of the sites are fully functional and beginning to flourish. Custom Canine Care (now a dog info-blog) and my old rat breeding site, now relaunched as The Scuttling Gourmet, have both had loads of time an attention, and are now starting to generate interest and subscribers. I managed to publish my first eBook from The Scuttling Gourmet series, and although it has some formatting issues, I did it and have sold around 15 copies in the past week, since it was released. I’m going to iron out the formatting problems as I prepare the second one, and then go back and revise the first one too. I have 7 planned in the series, plus two others on different aspects of rat life. So much has been happening in Janet’s life too, especially with the birthing of so many lovely lambs at her smallholding, and I have followed the stories avidly on Facebook. Pete and I have spent loads of time together, and have enjoyed various walks, pub visits, a cheese festival, a vintage fair (bought a great tie dyed velvety jacket) and a meal at Weatherspoons (on the back of an aborted attempt to go and see a live band at The Head of Steam). We’ve been a bit constrained because of my knee’s inability to walk far, or at any speed. There’s a lot of day to day stuff and Game of Thrones watching in between!

Imogen’s helped me along the road to spending time with family, by arranging a couple of get togethers for me and all three offspring (so good to have them all in Newcastle for a time). She’s cooked us some lovely food – and this coming week we get to play with her new Virtual Reality headset. I’m acutely aware, that despite all of this, I haven’t had much contact with Mum and Dad since she went home from hospital a few weeks back, and I need to prioritise them too. I managed a lovely evening with Lloyd while I was house sitting at Mak and Fern’s a couple of weeks ago, and he was up for the NERS show. We had a much needed catch up and enjoyed a chinese takeaway together. I’ve also made the first moves towards meeting up with a group of rattie friends from the south of England in the Summer. It’s good to record these things, not least because then you can hold me accountable, but also because it serves to help me realise that I am actually doing something about the principles I am re-learning.

Writing has been all I knew it would be. It excites me to learn new things and I am revelling in the progress the sites are making. I have learned so much, and have so far still to go, but I can see it beginning to come together – at least for the business site and the rat site. I have also been working on a new business site called Running a Pet Services Business, which is live, but I have yet to launch. This is a support and training site for people who are involved in pet care businesses. So that will be next to give wings!