It’s Been One Month

“It’s been one week…” *starts humming The Barenaked Ladies

And I digress. That wasn’t what I planned to name this post as I sat down to write it, but it was the first thing that came out and I did break out in song, so it stays.

Anyways, it has been exactly one month since I last posted anything. So what have I been up to? What’s been going on?

Well I really wish I had some great excuse, some big new to share. I wasn’t sick, I didn’t have any big tragedy or big success. Nothing really changed and I haven’t been going through anything. Really this past month has just been a regular life month, doing everyday life things and time got away from me.

Mostly I’ve been working a lot this past month, which is a double edged knife? Sword? Blade? Whatever the analogy is. I’ve been working a lot which is great because for awhile there they did really cut my hours and as a part time retail employee bountiful hours are never guaranteed. Plus, you know money. But at the same time, a lot of the hours I’ve been getting were last minute unscheduled shift extensions and for someone like me that really likes to plan out their days and weeks, those last minute changes have made it really hard to get much else done.

When I’m not at work almost all of my free time has been spent in the garden. Spring is in full swing here in Southern California and we are taking our garden this year so much more seriously. We have plants and seedlings everywhere. We are growing so many things we had to stop because we literally ran out of space. We have tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, eggplant, strawberries, corn, and a ton of marigolds, just to name some of what we have started. Also, different from last season, this year we tried to start a lot from seed, so we’ve had to deal with germination and then repotting and upsizing those pots until the seedlings have been ready to go into the ground, their bed or this final pot for the season.

When I’m not in the garden, I’ve been cleaning the house.

I’m not the only one that has been working a ton of hours. The husband has too. And to make things more difficult our schedules haven’t lined up much and we both have been working hours we aren’t really used to, which means, we’ve been lazy and messy and that has built up. Although I think we are finally finding our rhythm it seems like for a few weeks there, we just couldn’t get on top of our mess.

In line with cleaning I guess the one other big thing I have spent this past month doing is consolidating and downsizing, kind of. As I write that out, those aren’t the right words, but for the past month the husband and I have been going through our closest and the rest of our home getting rid of (selling and donating) things that don’t fit, we don’t use or we just don’t need. We also spent some time doing the same to our storage unit. And that whole process felt really good.

I didn’t get much done personally this month and that makes me a bit sad because I had a lot of great intentions. I wanted to read more and wanted to put some real effort into growing my freelancing. I also wanted to get down on paper a more concrete plan and schedule for not just this blog, but all of my creative endeavors. Although I fell short on all of those goals, those intentions are still there and the ideas I have, have only gown over the past four weeks.

In the weeks to come, I plan to continue to organize and downsize my life and physical things. I also plan to not only attempt, but succeed in all the things I intended to do this past month. I also plan to get better at working around sudden schedule changes when it comes to work and at the same time establishing better boundaries when it comes to that work schedule. Because my retail job is what pays my debt and my bills I always feel like I need to say yes, even when it comes at the cost of my health, my sanity and my personal goals and projects. That’s not ok.

Cover Image by Brian Merrill from Pixabay