Dancing Geek

A reflection on my holiday

Over my holiday I let myself just get on with the stuff that I was interested in, without thinking about whether it was reflection, action or rest time.

[As much as I'd love to think this is an amazing new way to get stuff done whilst ensuring I feel rested, I think that it's actually just a holiday.  Getting things that matter done is not always easy, reflection sometimes requires being an a hard space.  The whole point of my holiday was to have some easy time.]

Great friends and good fun

I ended up spending a long weekend with a couple of very good friends down in Somerset, chatting, playing XBox 360 (oh, how I want one now), and vegging out without feeling in the least bit self-conscious.  These guys rock!

As well as that I started to get back into cooking (more specifically baking: cake is yummy!)  Oh, I like cooking other stuff too, it seems a combination of trying and learning new things in the kitchen with enjoying ‘old favourites’ interspersed is suiting me at the moment.

My other idea of fun has been to look into what I need in order to have a more serious go at growing food this year (Ok, I admit it, Glyn did most, read all, of the work last year).

Pattern alert!

With the cooking, and the garden, it’s easy for me to get lost in books on the subject.  Flicking through amazing recipes trying to find the perfect one to try, pouring through gardening manuals trying to pick the perfect vegetables and varieties that we should grow.  Fortunately, I managed to find a few things that are relatively simple and easy to do, and I’m not too hung up about them turning out perfect so I’ve been able to actually do stuff too!

Momentum is beautiful, so I’m hoping to build on that.  Not with the intention of suddenly creating gourmet meals everyday or becoming the world’s best gardener (those these do pop up in my head and I will try to say hello in a loving way to these ideas without letting them become shoulds), but just to keep doing little bits every so often.  Little and often is rule number 2 after all!

Results so far

In the kitchen:

• a pretty decent loaf of bread that takes 1 1/2 hrs in total to prepare and bake – awesome!
• Tunisian Orange Cake (oh my god this is sooo nice!)
• Pizzas (nom nom) plus I froze one uncooked pizza base to see how that works out

In the garden:

• Cleared out rubbish pile to the tip
• Bagged up rotten leaves to use as leaf mould
• Prepared space for and put together second compost bin
• Started to turn the compost from first to second bin (aerate, hydrate and allow me to fix first bin which is falling apart a bit).

And one that is a bit of both: I got a separate mini bin for the kitchen for proper compost waste (raw veg stuff, egg shells, tea bags).  We have been putting all our kitchen waste in the council composting bin (they can take meat and cooked foods too, plus all our rabbit waste) so now I’ll be able to grab the best of that for our garden and let the council have the stuff that my little compost bin can’t digest!

You know what, it does feel better to focus on some of the good stuff I’ve been up to.  I may do this more often