Thursday 22 August 2024: Probate papers have left the building!

The final Probate accounts have left the building. I was going to take mine to the post office yesterday to get a signed-for receipt. However, my sister was happy to pop hers in the letterbox, so I did the same, thinking we could always ask them to acknowledge safe receipt and send them again if they don’t arrive. I nipped out on Tuesday evening to post mine while the poet finished cooking tea (spag bol).

Please keep everything crossed that this is an end to it all.

The poet was up early yesterday to head south for another business trip, this time without me. He was supposed to be going with several of his colleagues, but some cried off and he didn’t know about the others. If he’d known, I could have gone and he wouldn’t have had to spend his evenings with work colleagues. But all being well, he’ll be back earlier than originally planned due to so many dropping out when one meeting was cancelled.

It’s probably best that I stayed at home anyway, so I’d have more time to finish that proofreading job.

I woke up with a start an hour after he left, and then I fell back to sleep again. When I woke up another hour had passed and I was late getting up. I had breakfast, fed the birds, emptied the bins, collected and discarded windfall apples, and picked a trug full from the tree to be washed, dried and put into a fruit bowl. I was going to hang some washing out as well, but despite a nice breeze, the blue sky clouded over.

The first job I did was delete the SECRET SUGARHOLIC posts and close down the site. It’s not really very secret when people know it’s me, and it was just another procrastination tool to stop me doing some actual work. I’m keeping OUR GARDEN THIS WEEK because when we do something in the garden we do a lot and it’s good to keep a journal. Birdlife will stay here.

Our scruffy magpie seems to be growing his feathers back, but his wing still looks droopy. He’s flying further, but not very far from the ground. And he’s very much cock of our garden, not afraid to teach the younger magpies who’s boss. The blackbirds have found his personal food station and seem to be getting a bit fat.

The sparrows have done really well this year, replacing the starlings with their large flocks. We’re still getting a small flock of starlings, but the youngsters seem to have gone off on their own adventures. This means the food is lasting a little longer because the starlings are greedy things.

It looks like the sparrowhawk is catching a collared dove or wood pigeon a week. This isn’t deterring either from visiting the garden though, and the wood pigeons are looking a bit fat too. In the front garden, one of the wood pigeons has taken a fancy to the poet’s car and can often be seen sunbathing on the roof. Better there than in the middle of the road.

We also have a wren and a song thrush as well as the finch brigade and the tits. A family of jackdaws visits the garden too, and I think we’ve also seen a carrion crow.

Removing SECRET SUGARHOLIC from my TickTick suddenly gave me another half-hour slot every work day. I closed my account on that app I thought was NHS-related but was actually diet industry-related, and I checked when my subs are due on the walking app. (Next June.) That’s very cheap and I can still use the data from that to update the free NHS health app, which doesn’t have a very big food database.

I do think it’s important to track my food intake. What I think is less important is to weigh it all the time and calculate calories, which is a massive time-suck from my day. So I will track food but with zero calories, I’ll track activity, and I’ll track my weight. I lost 4lb 2 weeks ago, then put one of them back on again this week.

Next, I started today’s blog before I started to forget what I’d done. It was so late when I started work, I didn’t want to lose the entire day and wonder what I’d been doing for all that time. And then I started the slow update of my Bluesky. I did my 5-minute tech declutter, I updated this week’s diary, and I created a publication schedule for WORDS WORTH READING ISSUE ONE.

Then I emptied the dishwasher. It’s amazing how quickly we run out just going from 8 of everything to 6 of everything. Filled it up again. (It is going on more often now.) I made jellies for snacking and had a sandwich and a yoghurt for dinner and I chopped up half a honeydew melon to keep me going.

I couldn’t put it off any longer, though. Finally, I settled down to the proofreading markups. The sooner I get these out of the way, the sooner I can start work on new short stories for the bookazine. I may also kickstart my Duotrope subscription, for story ideas if nothing else.

Once I’d finished the markups, I sent them back to the client and was going to celebrate finishing them a day early. Then I spotted the picture captions still awaiting my attention…Ah well, there aren’t that many of them so they shouldn’t take very long. Then for the rest of today’s allocated slot for this work I’ll do something I didn’t get around to yesterday.