Thursday = floors day

March 26, 2020

I am not the most domesticated person. Having moved I have a lot more house to take care of so I had to make extra efforts to be organised. One of my biggest issues is just remembering to do things regulary. So I had to find tricks that would jog my memory. So for me Thursday = Thor’s day = Floors day makes sense. It also works from a scheduling point of view. Usually I teach Thursday but I now don’t need to leave the house until 12 for that. So I can do all the floors, have a shower, have lunch then go to work. I am not good at settling to things like longarming before teaching so this is a great use of time and means I am both freshly showered for class and freshly showered after doing the floors. It works for me. It is a little trickier now Tet is working from home and having confernce calls. By starting earlier and starting at the top of the house we made it work. I also had a revelation while mopping the bedroom floor. My upbringing didn’t teach me house keeping but it did teach me to be prepared. I ran out of the cleaner I use in the bedroom, I find I need differnce scents in different rooms. So I went down to the cupboard and got the spare one. I will now try to order another but this one will last several weeks if I don’t get lucky. That is what I learned growing up. We never had a spare of things. There was always stress and arguments when an item got low, yet my family still didn’t buy more until something actually ran out and was causing a problem. I have tried very very hard to not get in that position ever since I have had control of my own items.

I suspect some of you are now grumbling about me being smug. Feel free I have broad shoulders, but that’s really not the point. The point is, if you have a spare of most things all is well. I admit some things you get through faster and may need more than one spare, just bear in mind that’s need not want. For anything else we can relax a bit. If we have a spare we don’t need to buy or order more yet. When we open that spare we can start working on getting a replacement  and we will have some time to do that while we use that one. I have heard supermarket bosses say if you don’t need it today don’t buy it. I think that may actually cause more stress and panic and possibly over reaction once people see the thing they now desperately need. If we can work towards having a spare and then looking calmly for another spare when we open ours I think we can keep the demand spread and reduce our anxiety. I don’t think we need to buy 100’s of toilet rolls to feel safe nor dozens of cans of baked beans, just replenish what we have used this week, or 2 or 3 depending how often we can get shopping.

Yesterday we finished filling the first raised bed. I have to say the mud we have filled it in is not promising. It is a clay and chalk mix, dry and sticky. I have a limited amount of compost at the moment so I have mixed in a couple of bags to make the top 4 to 6 inches reasonable. I hope that as I work it it will steadily improve. It is what I have so for now it has to be good enough. Maybe I won’t have great crops this year but I will have something and that’s great. I did discover that even without bending mixing in compost is really hard work. You would think that lifting a small trowel of soil would be easy but repetition counts. A LOT. Still it is done now and once I get it well watered I can think about planting. Well I say that, this morning we had a heavy frost and local ponds were frozen. Not thick ice but cold enough that I worry for small plants. I haven’t got much fleece to cover them either, so I may need to wait a day or 2 for some of my plants.

Quilt wise I made good progress with the one on the frame, there is a chance I can finish mine today. Then I haave a customer quilt to go on. After that I want to play with some unusual textures and see what I can do with them. The urgent quilts that were on their way to me are now stuck in a depot somewhere and won’t be moving for a couple of weeks so I have some time to play and complete things sitting in my queue. Piecing has been very slow this week. Getting up a bit later and doing more physical work during the day has ann impact but I think part of the slow down is the loss of pressure. I was pushing for a deadline on May 1st, I am sure that will now slip and that makes it harder for me to get motivated. It is foolish as for now the entry form still has the same deadline and as far as I know the show hasn’t moved yet. I must get my backside in gear.