It was nice not to have a load of stuff planned for the weekend, and the idea was to chill a bit. The poet took the entire day off on Saturday to watch an annual fishing contest on the telly and while he did that, I went out and did the shopping for the week. We had a fridge/freezer now to fill, so it was an expensive shop, and we had a brand-new cooker, so I didn’t have to get creative with hob-top cooking. He did some pottering in the garage too, helped me bring in the shopping, cooked tea.
On Sunday, we had a massive panic. Neither of us could remember packing the keys to the camper van. We turned the house upside down looking for them. The poet moved everything from one side of the garage to the other and back again. I unpacked boxes, either into the house or into fresh boxes. But we couldn’t find them. At all. And after several hours spent hunting for them, we decided we must have left them at the other house. That’s two sets of van keys, the security fob to the secure lockup, the key to the storage box on the back, and the key to the ‘garage’ part of the van, where we keep the gas bottles and the wheel ramps. Not a good day.
We finally conceded defeat and I fired an email off to the chap who did our check-out inspection to see if he remembered seeing them in a kitchen cupboard on a hook. With nothing more to do, we went over to the house in case there was someone there to let us in (there wasn’t), we took a few things to the tip over there, and we took the dog for a 2-mile walk around a reservoir that turned out to be 1.82 miles…
All the time in between I was reading my quick guides to writing short horror and genre horror stories.
On Monday morning, we slept in. We’d had a stressful weekend when it should have been a chilled weekend, or on Sunday at least, and we were both dog tired. And we slept in. But once up, the poet was straight onto his laptop working and I was straight into my housework hour. When I’d done all I could, I had a look at this week’s updates to the calls for submissions and I selected three on the trot. When I transferred them to my TickTick, I initially had me working at the weekend to meet the three deadlines (29 July, 31 July, 1 August). But then I changed the ‘proofread’ tasks to ‘proofread & submit’, removed the separate ‘submit’ tasks, and I got my weekends back.
An email came in from the guy who did our check-out inspection saying he couldn’t be 100% certain, but he did think he saw some keys hanging on a hook in a cupboard. They don’t have keys any more, so he fired an email off to the owners, who said they’d been and had a quick look on Saturday, but didn’t open any cupboards and they’d be going back in the next week or so, when they would have a look for the keys. It was a relief that he thinks he remembered seeing them. Now we just have to keep our fingers crossed that they’re still there. If they’re not, that’s a lot of expensive admin we’ve got to do, plus pay for a new security fob.
The poet called him back to thank him and the guy reassured him once again. We’re not certain, but we’re in a better place than we were the day before. And the check-out guy didn’t have any obligation to do any of this for us, so we’re very grateful that he was on it straight away.
The poet had a couple of Teams calls, camped out on the table in the lounge and I came into my office nook and planned the next couple of weeks. I’m delighted to have given myself a new writing hour again, on top of a daily four or two hours for client work. This week I have one hour short on the client work, but in future, client work will have 18 or 19 hours per week allocated per job, depending on things like appointments and workmen coming.
This week we have the alarm people coming on Thursday and new bedroom furniture coming on Friday. Next week the windows are coming and the garden is being done.
I transferred the plan to the diary and came and started today’s blog. I didn’t have a busy day yesterday, though, as I was off to the dentist. But I ticked off everything I’d planned to do, which is always a good start to the week.
Today I have my first writing hour and I’m going to attempt that one-sitting short story. It’s 1,500 – 3,500 words so I’ll see how it goes. If it runs into my midday brunch break, so be it. I’m determined to have a go at this writing into the dark lark. This afternoon, it’s back to the proofreading for the client edit.
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I hope everything works out with the van keys.
It sounds like you’re quickly settling into a routine that works well for you!
I’m hoping allocating 4 hours to client work in the afternoons means I can get some writing done in the mornings. I’ve moved the dog walk to the evening for the duration of the summer. That frees up an hour too.