Morning tea and a cat on my lap. Such a great start of my day.

We’ve had a great weekend, but I didn’t take any pictures. Just spent a lot of time in the pool and ate out a few times. Now I feel up to normal life again.

First on the list: give our home a bit of love. I don’t really follow Flylady, but I do like the concept of the “weekly home blessing”, so that’s what I’m going to do.

And than… oh my that garden! Mucho calor, mucho agua, our Columbian neighbor said. And that shows, heat and water does the trick. I’ve got some weeding and trimming to do. But I am looking forward to that.

Wishing you all a great start to your week!

Oh my. Has it really been over a month since I last posted? The whole of July feels like such a blur.

I can’t really elaborate about it (not my story to tell), but let’s just say I highly underestimated how much stuff my parents managed to store in that tiny one bedroom apartment. It took a lot of driving up and down (the apartment is 2,5 hours away from us), a lot of sorting and organizing and making hard decisions. I feel like I have hardly been alive these past weeks.

In theory I know how to handle stressful and tiring situations like that. For me, it’s key to eat right and to connect with nature daily (work in the garden, take a walk, sit underneath a tree, swim in the ocean etc.) . Add a bit of creativity (knitting, writing, blogging) to that and I should be fine. But I never do that.

I did just the opposite. I ate all the wrong things and I spent the time I had between all that work on the couch watching YouTube or reading books I wasn’t actually enjoying. It was so easy to convince myself that I “just needed” that, but no, I didn’t. As a result I gained a lot of weight, I suffer from insomnia and I’m extremely tired. I think I could have prevented that.

Anyway, what’s done is done. Maybe I’ll remember next time. And now that the apartment is listed for sale and we only have to go back their one more time to pick up a few things, I can focus on recovering.

To be honest, it’s really hard to pick up the pieces. Part of me just wants to stay right there, on the couch, numbing my mind with other people’s lives and food. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life that way, so I am going to do better, one little step at a time.
I”m looking forward to get reacquainted with the woods… (pictures from before it all went hay way)

These three pictures kind of capture my weekend. On Saturday we packed some my father’s possessions (that sounds so much easier than it was) and stored it in our shed for the rest of the weekend. I took out his nice jackets and ties, because they get ruined after days and days in a stuffed suitcase (and sadly, he needs them this week for a funeral).

On Sunday T. had a date with our girls for his birthday and Father’s day (I had my date with them last month), so I was without a car for the day.. Not that I would have been able to drive or do anything. I was so tired that I spent the day on the couch, watching Youtube and knitting. I needed that!

And then I spent some time trying to plan the week. I want to get the whole moving/packing/sorting stress over with as soon as possible, so we’ll be driving a lot (my father’s old apartment is 2,5 hours away from us) and making long days moving things around. But it will be worth it. This has been weighing on my mind too long already. Knowing we have to do this, is one of the main reasons we decided to stay here longer (after being able to see my father of course). Part of me is panicking because of the amount of things we’ll have to go through (we haven’t even made a dent – or so it seems), but it’s also good to be able to finally do something.

Wishing you all a great start to your week (and for my American readers: Happy 4th of July!)!

Well, that didn’t go as planned. I wanted to post more often, but this week was quite the emotional roller coaster.

My father got offered a room in a care home, so we were so happy to finally be able to have him live in a place where he can have his own things surround him (he has been in hospital rooms for almost three months now). But… we went to look at it on Sunday and that room was ridiculously small, dark and depressing. We were shocked, to be honest, but we have no experience with care homes, so we asked around first, to find out if this considered normal. Turned out it wasn’t, so we didn’t take it.

Then they offered him a bigger room. My sister and my father went to see that one on Wednesday. I had a severe cold, so I stayed home, but I did see the pictures. And this time it is a good one. Light, bigger, with his own bathroom (the other one he had to share) and enough room to put in a small table, his favorite chair, a little bookcase and a small display cabinet for his collection of knickknacks that all hold special meaning to him. So he will move next Wednesday. T. and I are going to his apartment tomorrow to pack up his things (well, the things he wants to have in his new place).

I am trying to be reasonable about it and I do focus on being practical, but I feel sad that this is how it’s going for him. He can’t go pack himself, so everything he owns will be going through our hands the coming weeks (we need to empty out the house and sell it). Of course we won’t get rid of things without consulting him, but it feels wrong that his privacy is totally gone this way.

We also were very stressed out this week about the tropical storm that was about to hit Curacao. While it was good not to be there in case it hit hard, it was also frustrating not to be able to do anything to protect our house. Luckily it passed without any major problems. Just minor flooding from the rain in the lowest regions of the island, but that happens regularly.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well, but I’m ready for some peace and quiet. Let’s hope July turns out to be a good month!

(unrelated picture, but isn’t he cute?)

Wishing you all a wonderful weekend!

Even though we’re home together almost every day of the week, I still feel like weekends should be a little bit more special. But sometimes it’s just not. We didn’t do much at all. Or maybe that made it special? I was planning on taking pictures, but the blogger in me is not fully awake yet. The picture above is all I have.

It was finally a bit warmer last Friday and Saturday (the rest of the country was complaining it was hot), so part of me felt more alive then I’ve felt since we arrived here, but the other part decided it was time for a three-day-headache, so I spent most of the weekend on the couch (again – I’ve been sick on and off for weeks months now).

We visited my father on Sunday for Father’s day. He was very happy to have all his children together for a little while (we arrived early and left shortly after my sister, brother and sister-in-law arrived).

Despite the headache, T. and I took a (short) walk in the woods both on Saturday and Sunday. I hope to keep that up during the week. I really need to get off that couch more. Living in a tiny cabin with a low-maintenance garden should be relaxing, but I find I’d rather be a bit more busy. Even though I’d like to be one of those really calm and relaxed people, I think I need the thrill of a to do list get me moving.

I do have a rather busy day ahead (well, sort of, compared to what I’m used to these days – twenty years ago I’d call this an easy day). I want to clean the cabin, wash the sheets, maybe organize some cupboards (at least the “pantry” – I shoved everything in there the last time I went grocery shopping and I can’t find anything anymore). I want to take that walk, need to pay some bills and this afternoon one of the girls will be visiting and staying for diner, so I have to see what I can make for that with what I have. T. is at a client’s, so I don’t have a car today.
Oh, and I also want to knit a bit. I was planning to show you the finished project of what I was working on in the picture above, but a few hours after I took it, I frogged the whole thing. Sometimes “winging it” doesn’t work out.

Anyway, it’s time to start tackling that to do list. Wishing you all a great start to your week!