I was up on time on Friday and I read a daily newspaper over my first dirty cup of tea of the day. I didn’t play any games and I didn’t do any doomscrolling.
As there were no Friday errands to run, I did plan to spend 15 minutes in the garden, cutting back the Buddleia. But the green bin was still full and I couldn’t find any rubble/garden refuse sacks in which to put the prunings. Instead I decided to give the garden bird feeders a good overhaul. Some of them had peanuts or fat balls/blocks that were starting to go mouldy, and we don’t want that at any time, let alone when there are chicks on the horizon.
That meant my usual 5 minutes feeding the birds turned into 25 minutes, and I classed that as my ‘bit of movement’ for the day. I’m starting small and, hopefully, building up.
The poet was already in a Teams meeting when I hit the office, so I made us both a cuppa and put my headphones on so I could have an editing session. I finished one chapter before making us both our midday breakfast. The poet has lost 2lb in the past week. I still haven’t lost more than my initial 1½lb since we started 2 weeks earlier.
Breakfast over, I replied to an email from the client edit author then opened up the great novella challenge file and did some work on The Haunted House Hotel. I finished my Act 1 pre-writing, which I was doing at the same time that I was writing write Act 1, creating the last 2 characters for this instalment. I finally finished Chapter 2, with 5 scenes instead of 2, but the last two are very short scenes. And I dropped Body #1, which made me very happy.
The garden birds were very distracting on Friday. There was a lot of activity. The chaffinch returned for the first time in a while. We had collared doves, wood pigeons, blackbirds, a lot of sparrows with a solitary starling hanging out with them, the goldfinch gang, two robins, two jackdaws, Scruffy the disabled magpie, and a song thrush. They emptied the ground feeding trays, the bird table and the sunflower heart feeders (x3), but not one of them touched the new fat balls and blocks or the new peanuts in the feeders, so I suppose I’ll be clearing those out again in a couple of weeks.
I started today’s blog post and worked on this week’s diary before starting another chapter of the editing job. I didn’t do a weekly backup on Friday because I’d only worked on 2 files all week: the great novella challenge Scrivener file and my 12-project spreadsheet (updating word and page counts).
And while the poet gave his vocal chords a bit of a workout ahead of the weekend’s gig, I called it a week and closed down.
We did our usual shopping on Saturday, but we were out early due to a Monkey Dust gig. The gig was really good, with a great crowd and the venue asking if they could come back next week! I was also very pleased to see I’d lost another half a pound after all. So that’s 2lb in 2 weeks since starting 16:8, but 3lb since Christmas. Slowly, slowly catchy monkey…
On Sunday we headed out to Lincolnshire in our campervan. We had an early start but we had to get the van back early too, as it’s a Sunday in winter still. While we were out and about, we stopped off at Louth for a walk around the town.
If there’s one thing that stays with me from Louth it’s that they have a sense of humour there. One shop was called ‘Four Candles’ (The Two Ronnies), another was called ‘The Cheese Shop’ (Monty Python), and a third business was called ‘Trotters Traders’ (Only Fools and Horses). And when I had a look at the house prices in Louth, there were quite a few on Albatross Way (Monty Python).
“’Course you don’t get wafers with it!”
Sounds like a great weekend. And it sounds like the new eating pattern is working for you.
The eating thing is up and down, and we’ve both had potential side effects. But hopefully it will settle down.