Wow, I feel like the last time I did a Monday post was only yesterday… Last week was weird. A lot happened and a lot didn’t. My mom is home and more or less stable. The weeks ahead will be like a calm before the storm, I guess. She doesn’t want me to come over right now, because she’s determined to survive until after Christmas (we’ve already booked to go to the Netherlands in December). She’s also determined to get everything out of the little bit of life she still has. Enjoy being home with my dad, going out for a cup of coffee or to see the sea, buying plants and rearranging little things in the house and the garden, seeing friends and family. I really hope she’ll get a few months for that. Meanwhile, I find myself preparing for that sad urgent trip and trying to finish as much of my paid (bookkeeping, editing, and writing) work as I can. This is not a great state of mind to keep going for months, so I’m trying to be as hopeful as my mom is herself. Anyway, a new week ahead. I’m still planning to finish some of the bigger tasks and to get our house clean and organized as much as possible. We did two other ceilings this weekend, so now it’s just the bathrooms and the little hallway downstairs. Getting so close! I’m also trying to make decisions about blogging and Instagram, but I can’t find the time and headspace to really do that, so I’ll just go with the flow right now. I am actually knitting, so there is crafty content coming up soon 😉
A few months ago I started knitting potholders from cotton scraps. Great idea, isn’t it? Yeah, I thought so too. But after I finished the first two squares (the ones on the left in this picture), I found out I didn’t have enough scraps to continue the color choices I had made. I know. That’s what you get when you’re working with scraps. So I finished the other two squares with scraps in other colors. That does sound easier and quicker than it actually was. I didn’t like the color combinations I had to make and these squares lingered around for a long time. When I picked up knitting a few weeks ago, I forced myself to finish them. But I still didn’t like the color combinations. And I couldn’t get myself to sewing them together as potholders, because I would have either two with nice fronts and ugly backs, or one nice potholder and one ugly.
In the end, I decided to crochet borders on the individual squares, to make them into dishcloths. Now I can leave the nice ones on the counter and use the other ones for incidental cleaning.
Phew. Saved my scraps and my knitting. But man! Perfectionism can be difficult to deal with sometimes…
After some very dry months, we finally got some rain around here. It was about time. Today I’m sharing three things happening in my garden since then (apart from thornbushes and weeds growing like crazy).
1. We thought this tree was dead. It obviously wasn’t.
2. My aloë is turning green again. I honestly thought it was a different kind of aloë, because of the reddish/brownish color. But that turned out to be a lack of water.
3. Yeah. This one I don’t understand. But it’s there, so clearly the soil was wet enough.
(this picture doesn’t have a ceiling yet, but we fixed that shortly after I took it. See the last picture in this post for that)
Apart from the view, the kitchen was the big selling point in this house for me. We’d seen so many houses and most of them had hardly a kitchen at all. Cooking is not really a big deal here, obviously.
The kitchen is located outside the main house, connected to the porch. I love that layout, because we spent most of our days outside on that porch anyway (working on laptops). Since we’re still (always) on a very tight budget, we chose to use what was there, being a concrete (really!) base with wooden doors. Built for eternity so we’re planning to keep it, though I want to paint those doors (make them white or stain them darker) and replace those tiles one day. The sink was leaking, but we repaired it.
I have a gas stove and chose one that has a gas oven too because we’re on solar power. That’s also the reason we searched high and low for a big, but energy-efficient fridge. This one is just the right size for the two of us. I “built” the shelves next to it, because I had too little storage, but I wasn’t sure if I’d like open shelving, so I didn’t want to invest in buying something yet. So I just stacked some concrete blocks and old shelves to see how it would work. I like it. Since temporary solutions tend to stick around in our houses, I guess it will be here for a long time…
The table was one of the things we brought from Holland (it used to be my parents’ table) and we love how it looks here. We put a little bookcase with our record player in that corner because we don’t really have a living room (and we don’t know if we’ll ever have one, we’re always outside).
I just realized I already posted about the kitchen a while ago (you can find that post here). We’ve made a lot of progress since then. That’s good, since for me it’s clearly the heart of my home.
Just for fun: let’s go back to the beginning, just after we closed on the house (I did clean the floors already).
So now I’m back to to-do lists? Well, sort of. This one is supposed to be fun.
I keep telling Chris that her crafty to-do lists are inspiring, but usually I stick with saying that and don’t actually act on it. Trying to change that now, even though my lists will be short and uninspiring. But maybe it will help to get the crafting (and blogging about it) going again. I do miss it.
This week’s list:
– finish sleeveless sweater/tunic (so close! but it’s getting so large that I don’t like handling it during the day – too hot) – figure out what to do with green yarn and Christmas yarn I bought just for the fun of buying yarn ( I have three skeins of the green and only one of the Christmas colored) – start a new hat (possibly with that dark gray yarn again), because how can I go on without having a hat on my needles?
Okay, leaving it at these three things. I’d like to add sewing (something! don’t care if it’s just a small, simple project – I’m just itching to sew) to it, but I think that will have to wait. Still have a lot of work on my plate this week.
This weekend we removed the metal bars that were blocking our view from the porch. That makes such a difference! It felt symbolic, sort of, though I can’t really explain why.
Last week was hard. On Wednesday I woke up from a call from my father. They stopped my mother’s surgery (they were going to remove the tumor) because they found metastases. Even though I somehow expected it, it (is) hard to deal with. We also had some bad weather and since we’re fully on solar power, that caused a lot of stress (if the batteries get drained too far, they’ll stop working at all). Anyway. Let’s hope this week is better. My mom is having another surgery right now (to fix something that blocks her stomach) and if that works, she’ll be able to leave the hospital and go home. That’s what she wants more than anything else, so I hope this works.
I’ll be working hard this week to get things done before I travel to Holland to visit her (don’t know when yet, but soon).
I was going to write a long post about how to make a to-do list. Not that I am very good at that, but usually trying to write about something, doing research and thinking about how I would implement it, helps to get a clear vision about something. But this Monday, having the topic of todo lists on my mind, I realized something else. Something that made me stop in my tracks.
Sometimes it’s better not to make a list.
I know… I love lists too. I like to see things in writing, I like to check off the things I’ve done. I even like to make lists in my planner to be able to look back and see what I’ve accomplished in the past.
But this particular Monday I needed to do a lot of things. And I do mean an awful lot. Some daily chores (clean up the kitchen after making breakfast, cleaning the toilet), weekly chores (changing the bed) and some general putting things back where they belong. I don’t know if it’s just us, or if this happens to others too, but we tend to make big messes during the weekend. I usually put T.’s tools (I almost wrote toys ;-)) away when he’s done using them, but in the weekend I just think “I’ll do that on Monday” and go my merry way. I also tend to just drop my stuff on “my” table (a folding table that is a temporary place to store my planner, notebook, knitting, e-reader, books etc. – one day I will have a desk of my own), instead of putting them away as neatly as possible (I have some baskets and bags). I also needed to fold an put away laundry, mop all the floors, write some emails, prepare some blog posts, work on my blogs and websites, start writing a book or at least a short story … well, you get it. The list was endless. I know that most planner people say you need to do a braindump in a situation like this and I was getting myself some paper to actually do that. But I already felt overwhelmed and stressed out, knowing it would be a very, very long list.
And then I realized that maybe I should just start doing what I needed to do, instead of wasting valuable time and energy to write it all down.
So I started by writing that e-mail I have been putting off for weeks (you know, eat that frog), cleaned up that kitchen and then I started working from the back of the house. Changed the bed, started the laundry, dusted the bedroom, gave the bathroom a quick wipe, moved the shoe rack to the place I had been meaning to move it to for over a week, put away some tools, cleaned the toilet, reorganized my table, swept the floors, etc., etc. (I’m not going to list everything, that would be very boring, but I think this isn’t even a third of what I did) By the end of the day, I had done so much! And even though I love to cross things off lists, I did feel as satisfied as I would have if I had made a list. Maybe even more, because now I was just happy to look at my clean house and thinking that tomorrow there would be time to sit with my laptop and take care of the computer work.
So now I have a new strategy: I’m going to rely more on my brain and my eyes and less on my lists and schedules, especially for household tasks. After all, I know what needs to be done, I’ve been a housewife for almost three decades (Um, really? Oh my, time flies!). If I only write down the things I tend to forget or that are one time only, I’ll not only save a lot of time writing things down, but I think it will also help with my stress levels. And isn’t life a lot more fun without stress?
(now if I could only trust myself to not make lists for my other work… I’m actually scared that I’ll forget to do taxes, though that never happens)
Exciting things happened here this weekend! Our ceiling material arrived last Friday, so we finally could start installing them. It’s silly. You don’t need them. But they make such a difference visually! (If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve probably already seen these pictures, but I really wanted to put them here too). Remember the bedroom? This is before.
This is after:
So much better! We also did the kitchen, but I planned a progress post about the whole kitchen to go online next week (I think) so I’ll save those pictures for that post.
This week will be a busy one. Lots of computer work (editing two novels, writing some press releases, maybe work on writing my own book too) and of course more ceilings to install.
But I guess that’s good since it will help to keep my mind off other things.
My mother will have surgery this Wednesday, and we hope she’s strong enough to survive. But if she doesn’t have the operation, she probably will never leave the hospital anyway, so it’s more or less a loose-loose situation. The surgeon and the oncologist still thinks she can handle the operation though, so we try to stay positive.
Last Tuesday we went to the “Lion Fish Awareness Festival” at The Dive Shop. Not something we would choose to go to spontaneously maybe (we’re not divers), but some of our friends were part of the organizing committee and invited us to come. It was fun and I actually learned a lot, even though I wasn’t completely unaware of the lionfish problems. I knew they are not native in this part of the world, but migrated here, and that they are a big threat to the reefs. That’s why hunting and killing them is encouraged. They’re trying to turn it into a sustainable industry by harvesting the meat for food and using the spines and the fins to make jewelry.
What I learned:
1. The reason why lionfish are such a big threat is that they eat the fishes (often before they get a chance to reproduce) that eat the algae that would kill the reef by covering the corals. Isn’t nature fascinatingly complicated? Also, the lionfish reproduce incredibly fast, so the threat is getting bigger and bigger.
2. I learned how corals reproduce and grow. It was not a significant part of the festival (that turned into food and drinks and music rather quickly), but the singer of the band said: “If you want to see baby corals you need to go with that lady there.” I was a bit bored, T. was talking with someone else and hey… babies. Who doesn’t want to see babies? So I joined the group. We were led into a laboratory and got a very interesting lecture about corals from the lady who turned out being there to do her Ph.D. on that subject. I already knew corals are animals and should have concluded that this means they reproduce by sperm entering eggs, but I never thought about how they would do this (corals are static like plants). Well, it’s actually quite simple: they release everything into the water and that’s where fertilization takes place. But fertilization has to take place within two hours. So the corals actually synchronize the release with the other corals. After years of study, they found out they pinpoint the month by the water temperature, the day by the moon cycle and the hour by the sunset. Now researchers are able to calculate when the corals will release and they collect the eggs and sperm to make sure more eggs are fertilized than there would be naturally. They showed us the larvae (so tiny that you can only see small dots in the water) and baby corals. We needed a microscope for that, but only four days after the larvae attached themselves to an (in this case fake) reef, they already grew a mouth and tentacles to feed themselves and started to grow the skeleton we see as coral. They also showed us a coral that was about five years old. It was only the size of a thumb. They grow really slow. That’s why breaking off a tiny bit of coral as a souvenir is so devastating for a reef.
3. I didn’t learn how lionfish tastes. You could buy it there and have it prepared in a few ways, but we never got to it. A few friends did taste it. One of them spit it out (said it tasted/ had a texture like raw fish), but most of them liked it. I was told it has a firm texture and doesn’t taste too fishy. Someday I’ll try it. I think. (I used to like fish, but here – with those high temperatures – it never tastes that good to me.)
I did learn though that there’s only a small part of the fish that’s edible. It’s also rather time-consuming to clean the fish. You have to be very careful since the spikes stay poisonous for a while after the fish dies. You have to put them in the freezer for a week for the poison to disappear. But as I said earlier, nothing was wasted. The spines and fins were saved to make jewelry, the meat was eaten and the guts were fed to stray cats.
See an example of corals spawning here on Youtube organizer of the event, pictures of jewelry made from fins and spines: Lionfish Caribbean
Our bedroom was one of the rooms that I really wanted to be finished before we moved in. We didn’t make that happen though. No ceilings, no air conditioner. We also need to hang something on those bare walls. But it is clean and white and peaceful. Especially compared to where we started…
We use plastic bins as nightstands. Our photo albums and memorabilia are in there for safe storage and easy access.
We decided to buy fabric wardrobes for our clothes. They are very cheap, so that’s convenient, but I also find that chipboard wardrobes tend to get smelly after a while here (it’s hot and humid). Until we can afford solid wood, this will work perfectly.
We have a second-hand air conditioner, but we haven’t installed it yet. Even during this hot period, we manage to sleep pretty well with just the ceiling fan, so we’re thinking about not installing the air conditioner at all. We’re fully on solar power (I’ll talk about that in another blog post), so using as little electricity as we can is important.
p.s. the window bars don’t look so good, I know. But this room is on ground level and we need it for safety.
NOT A STATION 