I had a very productive week at work 6th-10th October.

Unfortunately I was incubating something and on the evening of Friday 10th I went to bed very early and woke up sick on Saturday. I made it to a pumpkin crochet class on Sunday and survived the week at work by staying as far away as possible from colleagues and more or less going to bed as soon as I got home and living on tinned soup and pasta.

Still not feeling great but a bit better than last weekend but I have done nothing around sorting the flat out - in fact many things spiralled backwards because I had very few spoons the last 7 days!

I am hoping to reclaim my kitchen and bathroom today.

Apparently Question of the Day is
The definition of an antique is something that is 100 years old – do you own anything that old?

Yes - most of the furniture in the cottage and flat is probably that old, as are some pictures and ornaments, my oil lamp collection and some of my jewellery, plus several books.

I have reviewed my ALL THE THINGS LIST and still think I can make real gains before the end of the year.

#ORJENISE100 carrying on and will complete in October. My space feels a little lighter even though I only got through half the prompts. Worth completing!

HOME: spent most of last week at the cottage - left home at 4:15am Monday morning when the roads were quiet and was in Tesco's in Bangor by 9:30am which is pretty impressive. For comparison left the cottage at 3:15pm on Friday and got home at 9:30pm. It was lovely to have the time away even though working. I got a tiny bit of gardening done, the cats travelled well and I now have another list of things to sort out when next up there at the end of the month! Back at the flat I have blitzed my kitchen, hall/landing/stairs and bathroom clean and am about to start on the chaos of my bedroom.

HEALTH: knees still aching - possibly as a result of long drive Friday. Need to get flu shot booked in this month and debating whether to pay for Covid shot as it seems to be doing the rounds at work.

LIFE ADMIN: hold onto your hats - I have started to check my current pension status. I've misplaced the login details to my Civil Service and Social Housing schemes so asked for those. The first part of my TLS scheme looks OK but I do need to find the second part after they switched suppliers. My Local Govt scheme is OK though I should increase my contributions or buy AVCs. Things seem a bit better than I expected and I'm glad TLS had a good scheme and I was able to have a few years adding 20% of my take home pay thanks to their matching policy. Why the sudden push? A seminar last week by the LGPS scheme which set out how much income you need for a basic or comfortable retirement which was, quite frankly, scary!

DIGITAL DECLUTTER: this is a combo of #orjenising things, getting my life admin sorted but also dedicating some time to dealing with the massive amount of stuff I have digitally. I have multiple of email accounts - there's my main one, a back up and my fandom related one just on the top of the pile. I'd had my main Gmail since the early 2000s and there was (last year) over 35,000 emails in there plus a G:drive full of docs. I've done a bit of dedicated sorting over the last few weeks and am down to just under 13,000 archived emails and transferring important things over to Dropbox. I've been unsubbing from mailing lists, or setting them up to my backup account (so I can have one account for Important Things and one for Everything Else) and it seems to be working. My back up account is in very good order. I hope to get to the fandom related account over Christmas. I also had over 1000 images on my phone - so many pics of cats, garden, allotment and epic amounts of screenshots. It'll probably take me most of October to sort those out and then I'm scheduling a monthly image review in my diary!

GARDENING/ALLOTMENTING: at the cottage I planted up some flower beds and cut backs the herbs. I Still have remaining winter pots to plant at the flat, as well as sorting out a load of new house plants and the allotment. It's been too wild to do much outside the last two days (thanks to Storm Amy) but may try to work from home on Wednesday and take a long lunch break to finish the winter pots.

COOKING/EATING: ate like a queen at the cottage - duck breasts, sea bass and ribeye steak were features of the week away. Decent meals every evening and lovely lunches and I ate pretty much everything I bought plus a lot of the fruit/veg I took with me. Also discovered I really like persimmons. Cancelled the Oddbox which should have arrived on Friday as I still had plenty of fruit and veg at home so have time to eat down my courgette, onion and potato gluts as well as empty the fruit bowl. About to make a big pot of something to feed me for a few days and then either a Thai green curry or Keralan Prawn curry midweek.

READING/LISTENING: Not reading/ listening at the moment - been too busy!

WATCHING: dumping a lot of my viewing as the autumn shows are coming back I find myself oddly lacking in enthusiasm to watch them. I signed up for a free trial of Acorn TV and blitzed my way through the two most recent seasons of Whistable Pearl and then all four seasons of Harry Wild. Might keep it for one more month then cancel. Have cancelled Disney+ - meant to do it for ages but the recent debacle was the final straw.

CREATING/LEARNING: still here -> summer has been nuts at work so hardly any time for crochet club or other creative endeavours.

CATS: all good. They travelled very well to the cottage and the passenger seat of the car is now covered in cat hair.

VOLUNTEERING: recent committee meeting was short and productive. The only task I have arising from it is to be around on the morning of Friday 24 for a skip drop off and be present on Saturday 25 that for a work day. Which means I should be free Sunday 25 to drive to the cottage.

SOCIALISING: not last week.

WORK: still hoping October may be a bit quieter than March through September have been! Though this coming week looks full on but the following two might be easing off a bit especially with the new way of doing inspections agreed at the last reps meeting.

Plans for this afternoon include my bedroom, cooking, and sorting house plants. If the wind drops possibly a little bit of tidying the front garden.