Tag: Decor

Cosy evenings

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Two miles this morning…

…and I’m feeling really happy with my running this week – I was a bit concerned at the weekend because my legs were feeling really stiff and didn’t seem to be easing off, but they’re doing a lot better after a few days of recovery runs. Another two miles tomorrow before building back up over the weekend.

I was mostly doing day job work today, but I also spent some time making plans for house decor. The frames arrived for a large wall project I’m going to be working on over the next few weeks – I just need to wait for the photos I ordered from Freeprints so I can get on with things! Unfortunately the photo prints are being sent via Royal Mail (see Thursday’s post for my current woes on that subject), and we haven’t had a delivery on our street since Saturday. Fingers crossed for tomorrow.

I did, however, put up a framed print that has been sitting around upstairs for the two and a half years since we moved in. One step closer to covering up our horrible magnolia walls (they will all get painted or wallpapered eventually, but it’s going to take a long time).

I am properly enjoying my evenings in now that autumn is officially here (meteorologically speaking). I’ve got the incense and candles going on the hearth (need to stock up!) and am appreciating the earlier darkness. I know a lot of people miss summer when it’s gone but I am not one of them – I’ve been looking forward to this time for months.

Hoping for another productive day tomorrow… and maybe another item up on the wall!

Autumn hearth
It’s not quite time to have the fires on yet (although I have been blasting them in the mornings when I get cold after my run!), so the hearth is home to lit candles and incense in the evenings now. I’m not short of regular candles but am nearly out of home fragrance so need to stock up soon.

Today’s earworm playlist:

Rizzle Kicks – ‘Down With The Trumpets’
Sacre – ‘The London Marathon’
Jared Emerson-Johnson – ‘New Location Unlocked [Midtown Remix]’

Midweek, muddling on

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A mile and a half-ish today!…

…although the extra half-ish was only because the roadworks near us had become so convoluted by this morning that I couldn’t actually access certain streets. I’m really looking forward to those roadworks being finished, but I’m not holding my breath (it’s been four years so far).

I’m experimenting with intermittent fasting again (i.e. only eating during certain hours of the day) to try and help get my lockdown weight off, and it’s been going well so far. I do feel a bit hungry earlier in the day, but am still finding that my healthy Slimming World evening meals are satiating enough that I don’t need much else during my ‘eating window’. I don’t think I’ll do it long-term, but I’m happy to try it for a few weeks to see if it helps me get back down to my SW target again.

Mostly admin and game creation today. Tomorrow will be slightly different, as Geth has a big and important milestone birthday.

Vase of corks
These corks (possibly a result of my penchant for alcohol-free fizzy since getting sober) were clogging up the cupboard yesterday, and I needed that cupboard space for all the birthday cake Geth had requested, so I’ve tidied them into this vase. I think it’ll look better once the vase is full, but judging by the amount of Nosecco I’ve been drinking recently, that won’t take long.

Today’s earworm playlist:

Michael Land – ‘Closing Themes (Monkey Island 2)’
Michael Land – ‘Mêlée Island’
Natalie Cole – ‘Miss You Like Crazy’

Small steps for the house

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Back to the recovery runs this morning…

…and then I spent the afternoon doing admin and house stuff. Have ordered the new dishwasher – something I’ve been wanting for a while as it will free up the time Geth has to spend on the dishes (the kitchen is his job). I’ve also got a picture up on the living room wall. Just one, but it’s a start…

As I mentioned last week when we got a few mirrors up in the downstairs bathroom, getting things on the walls is making me realise how beige the whole place is. I think a few pots of paint are going to be my next house purchase, so that I can gradually make the rooms look a bit brighter!

Busy day tomorrow, and then another big running weekend.

Butterfly picture
I am very keen for this boring magnolia wall to turn some kind of nice pale aquamarine sometime soon.

Today’s earworm playlist:

Justin Bieber – ‘Love Yourself’

Need words, cannot brain

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The last couple of weeks have been pretty full-on and I think I need to delete a few files from my brain now, as it no longer appears to be working.

Good things today:

  1. Rain cleared up for parkrun and I was marginally less slow than last week
  2. We won two out of three missions on our Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth campaign
  3. I (or my slow cooker, really) made the best curry for tea

I’d best leave it there. Hoping to be slightly more with it tomorrow.

Repurposed childhood marble collection
Not an OOTD: these are not the marbles I have currently lost, but they’re very pretty in my decorative wooden bowl with these tealight holders. I’ve had most of them since early childhood.

Today’s earworm playlist:

Michael Land – Jazzy Voodoo In The Swamp
Kygo and Whitney Houston – Higher Love
Jim Croce – Bad, Bad Leroy Brown

De-hoarding, part 2

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Remember when I organised all my bracelets into colour groupings in the hope that I’d wear them more often?

Yeah, so that turned out to be a bit of a waste of time, given that I threw 90% of them out today.

When I was packing up the old house, I knew that I’d end up chucking quite a lot of stuff out to make things neater, but I didn’t expect that I’d end up being so ruthless with my clothes and accessories.  The thing is, I’m just sick of the hoard.  The hoard is everywhere, I’m currently spending my entire time sorting through it and tripping over piles of it and moving boxes of it about so that I can access more boxes of it, and it’s causing me a lot of anxiety and stress, especially on ‘sorting days’ like today when my hoarding nature means that I have to go through every single thing and devote mental energy to agonising for a few minutes about whether I should keep it.

And with jewellery and hair accessories it literally is EVERY SINGLE THING I’ve ever owned in my life, because you don’t outgrow necklaces and scrunchies the way you do clothes, so my collection genuinely dates back to when my parents first decided they needed to tie my hair back in 1987:

Updo in 1987
New baby bro scheduled to arrive next month, gotta raise my style game.

Yes, I still have those green tartan ribbons.  Of course I do.  They’re not being chucked out (they’re in an inaccessible part of the hoard right now, so I couldn’t even if I wanted to), because if it dates from the ’80s, it obviously stays.  (What, you thought I’d been cured of ALL of my issues?)

Thankfully, I’m coming to the end of the ‘sorting days’ as far as my wardrobe is concerned, but next month, there will be the study.  Oh dear god, the study.  Boxes and boxes and boxes full of old correspondence, and schoolwork, and the first fumbling childhood steps in my lifelong fiction-writing habit, and the most painfully private diaries and poetry – all of which will need to be carefully scanned and then frantically shredded (and ideally burnt, but I’m not sure the atmosphere could cope).  Mounds of receipts and paperwork and keepsakes, which will need to be sorted and filed.  Piles of old broken electronics, and the manuals for the old broken electronics, and the twisted and tangled mess of connector cables for the old broken electronics.  Artwork and other wall decorations that I don’t like any more but have been dragging with me through approximately five house moves.  Cassette singles I bought in the early ’90s, which I won’t throw out, but will instead stare at wistfully for ages, marvelling at their glorious age and endurance, remembering a different century, wasting time when I’m supposed to be getting on with the hoard.

I know I’ll get to the end of it sometime.  It just feels like such a mountain to climb.  A literal mountain of stuff.

But I’m going to climb it, because there’s no other way through for me.

Beermats

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When I was a kid in the ’80s and ’90s, I spent what seemed like an inordinate amount of time in the back of a car, travelling around the UK to visit family, who lived all over the place.  My dad likes to take a lot of driving breaks, and so while we visited a lot of motorway service stations, when we were out on more remote roads our pit stop of choice was always some random country pub.

Country pub in 1988
Country pub, 1988, with my mum and younger brother. Pub drinking starts early in my family.

I don’t know where my hoarding/collecting/general possessiveness tendencies come from (some family members have suggested it’s genetic, as a lot of us are like that), but they’ve always been there, and so as a small child I soon started to notice the brightly coloured and highly collectible bits of cardboard that were always sitting there on the pub tables, preventing my glass of Diet Coke from leaving an unsightly ring.  I think you all know where this is going.

Beermat collection
A small fraction of my extensive beermat collection.

As an adult, I’ve turned part of my large beermat collection (i.e. as many as will fit on the above corkboard) into a slightly dubious-quality ‘piece of art’ that hangs in our hallway.  The display is an exercise in nostalgia as much as anything else – I often pause in the hallway and marvel at the way that some of them are painfully of their time.  The Furstenburg one in the top-left corner is absolutely classic ’80s advert styling, the competition advertised on the Martini one in the third row has a closing date sometime in 1986, and the ‘Head Out To Marlboro Country’ one in the second row brings back memories of an impossibly long-ago century when you were actually allowed to advertise smoking as cool and adventurous with only a tiny, hard-to-read government warning along the bottom edge.

At the same time, some drinks are so classic that I don’t think they’ve updated their beermat design in the intervening 20-30 years (Strongbow and Newcastle Brown, I’m looking at you) and I still see identical ones in the pubs of today.

I stopped collecting beermats around the point in my mid-teens that the alcohol itself became more interesting, but I’ll always have a soft spot for this particular hoard.