By Tuesday I was supposed to be in the swing of things again, but I wanted to take the dog on his first proper walk in the new neighbourhood. Before we went out, I put some towels through the washing machine. However, rain was forecast, so I didn’t rush to stack up a day’s worth of washing.
We walked down to a meadow on the other side of a main road. The land belongs to a private school and access is ‘permitted’ until the landowner decides otherwise. The sun was shining, in between the clouds, and it was still warm but not too warm for go for a walk.
As we did our circuit of the meadow, I impressed myself when I heard and identified a skylark. The poet is forever pointing out skylarks to me and I always, always miss them. But this time, on my own with the dog, I heard its call and I knew it was a skylark. Then, something rather special happened.
Only feet in front of me a little pale reddish brown bird suddenly appeared out of the long grass and slowly began to soar upwards. It climbed and climbed until it was a tiny dot in the sky. With my head craned back, still I could hear it singing. My first independent skylark spot, and I could have almost touched it before it started to rise towards the clouds. The poet will be so jealous when I tell him.
Further round the meadow, a sole buddleia, or ‘butterfly bush’, showed off lovely pink flower spikes all over it. And as I got closer to take a picture, a hoverfly buzzed towards it and settled down to drink nectar. What a treat!
The walk, door to door, took just 30 minutes and worked out at around 0.9 of a mile. I think it may be our daily weekday walk in future as our weekend walks are starting to get longer.
Back at my desk, which is currently the table in the living room, I started to try and tidy up those old Rocketmail emails before the account disappeared for ever. I couldn’t just select a folder and forward it, or even several emails at the same time and forward those. No, I had to go in and forward every single one I wanted to keep. And I was using my phone as a hotspot, so the internet wasn’t great either.
I did think I’d got into a good rhythm, until I noticed that for some reason Rocketmail wasn’t forwarding all the emails I was actually forwarding. For every ten, which I thought was a nice round number, it was only sending six, and who knows where the other four went. In the end I had to steadily go through them all, one by one, forwarding the email I wanted to keep, making sure it landed in the current email in box, then deleting it from the list so I didn’t do it twice.
Often, due to the poor and unstable connection, I had to send several again. I spent all day on it in the end, and still had lots to do.
I did manage to transfer some entire folders, those with only a few emails in them (12, 14, 22), and I deleted a lot of emails too (probably around a hundred), but the job wasn’t finished by the end of the day.
At tea time, a decorator called in to provide a quote for painting and papering the house.
There’s only one room ready at the moment, the bedroom (or the Royal Bedroom, in the East Wing at Wordsworth Heights…). But he said it would be more cost effective to have at least another room lined up so he had something to do in between waiting for paint to dry. I said he could probably do the hall (the Grand Hall…) as well, and we might even have the study ready too (Estate Manager’s Office…), if we pull our fingers out.
The living room (erm, the Parlour and the Formal Dining Room, in the West Wing…) might be a two-day job by itself, and the lobby (the Gallery, where we walk up and down when it’s too wet to go outside to promenade…) won’t be ready as we may be putting tongue-and-groove wall panelling in there. The bathroom (erm, the Bathroom…) will be done by the bathroom fitters, and who knows what we’ll do in the kitchen (the Servants’ Quarters!).
His estimate was reasonable, though, and I hired him to come in mid-August for a week. That gives us another five to six weeks to get more rooms ready and the new windows should be in by then too. If we’re lucky, the joiner may have also turned up to change our internal doors, but he seems to be ghosting me at the moment.
After he went, the rain came, and I sat outside with the dog in that for a while, drinking it all in. We watched a lone wood pigeon notice something different about the garden and negotiate its way to the new bird table. I’d put some sunflower hearts on the table and filled a bird bath we inherited with water, but this was the first time I saw a bird pluck up the courage to come and investigate. It took him a few goes, but once he made it onto the table, underneath the roof, he sat there happily munching for ages.
On Wednesday, I put the rest of the towels through the washing machine, I washed up my crocks in the sink (no dishwasher here…), and during my reading hour, I read a chapter of my book and transferred another folder’s worth of emails over from the old Rocketmail account on my mobile phone. It seemed to work much better, and much quicker, than on the laptop.
I took the dog out for his new daily walk around the meadow. When we got back, the washing machine had got stuck mid-cycle… Uh-oh! Surely we didn’t have to replace the washing machine on top of everything else?
I fiddled with it a bit, tried to get it to restart, but it wouldn’t. So I put it onto a drain and spin, and it got stuck again just two minutes into a twelve-minute cycle. Obviously, there were too many towels in there! I put it on a much slower drain and spin, and this time it completed the cycle. Then I took out half of the towels and started the machine again, this time on a quick wash as it had already been part-washed.
While that was running, and with half an ear listening out for it, I shared some photographs on social media and edited some videos from our dog walks, I had my midday breakfast, and I started today’s blog.
The first half-wash was ready to hang out, so I put the next half through and took the first half out to hang on the line. I sat down on the garden bench we’d brought with us for a minute, until the dog jumped up and joined me. A sparrow came to have a look at the bird table, but disappeared inside next door’s rowan bush, and a green finch stood atop the tallest tree two gardens away and shouted at us.
I came back inside and finally tackled the plan of work for July and beyond.
I decided that I’d work on one job at a time again until I’ve shifted the work already in. I can drag a client job out over two (or three) weeks, allocating an hour or two every day. Or I can do those ten or fifteen hours in one go, one after the other, and have a job done and back with the client within a week. I’ll still spend the mornings doing housework, walking the dog, reading books, and my exercises again once I’ve got back into the swing of those. But I’m hoping this might give me longer gaps between client jobs in which I can concentrate on just my own work.
The big job coming up is republishing all of my short stories and the collections, and publishing direct to Kobo and Amazon. I’ll leave Apple with Draft2Digital and work on my marketing to try and bump up the royalties so I don’t have to pay an annual fee. However, I also want to be writing short stories for anthologies and other calls for submissions. We’ve just this week lost another short story market in the UK to AI with the ‘fiction team’ blatantly admitting they’re asking AI to write the stories in future.
It won’t be long before that magazine bites the dust completely. I mean, who wants to read stories written by robots? And it’s a FICTION magazine! Or maybe I’m completely out of touch with the general reading public…
A message came in inviting me to a Thing, and while it’s not really my usual kind of Thing, I have accepted. Took me ages to compose my replies, though!
Yesterday, first job of the day was another washload through. I’ve pretty much caught up on the washing now, so yesterday was the first of the regular washing. It went on a long wash with real washing powder, and the last of the capsules with liquid detergent in went in the bin.
My ‘reading hour’ was spent moving another folder’s worth of emails over from Rocketmail, new month finance work, and I paid my deposit for this Thing I was invited to. I hung the washing out, had something to eat, and took the dog down to the meadow again for his walk. When I got back, I updated today’s blog post and went back to my monthly planning on TickTick.
Once I’d filled the month, I finalised yesterday’s blog post and uploaded that, reviving and adding it to Patreon and Medium again after having a few weeks off from both of those. After only a few weeks off, I was struggling to remember the rhythm again, but I got there. Today’s should be easier.
And then I caught up on some reading. I had two book reviews to write up and I’m in the middle of a third book. I’d like to spend more time on this while I reduce that backlog as well.
Today is more of the same kind of gentle work before the balloon goes up again on Monday. If we can get someone to dog-sit for a few hours at the weekend, we’ll go and and get those appliances. Otherwise, the only weekend plans we have are more unpacking.
Have a great weekend!
This post appears on Words Worth Writing, Medium and Patreon.
