A Smashing Weekend

Good morning all. Happy Monday!

This weekend was positively brilliant, we lazily accomplished a great deal and I love weekends like that!  The heat was a bit much through some of the day, but as the afternoons cooled, they became really conducive to me being able to do things I needed to.

On Saturday, my friend - Kwacha - came over and mowed for us, while Mark worked some more on our concrete patio-type strip for my plants. I transplanted 3 gardenia plants into one huge pot and started 6 more gardenia cuttings in diluted Miracle-Gro and rooting powder on their cut stems. My goal eventually is to have a couple, in pots on the front porch to add a fragrant whiff to the air as we sit out there, and to line the back right hand corner of the field fence line, as that is where Mark's beehive will be from next Spring. I am trying to get a bee friendly environment set up down there ready to welcome them.

Mark transplanted the 2 banana trees into larger pots. Eventually, they will go in the ground, but I haven't figured out where I want to put them yet.

Yesterday, I pulled all the old vines out of the pots. Peas, beans, cucumbers and cantaloupe. All production now ceased, so they went to the next part of their journey, the compost bin, to help replenish the soil for others, in future.

We took a second chance on allowing the chickens out to roam, while we were out there with them, and this time, they behaved themselves and gave us no problems in going back into their pen. I even got to hold and pet Maybelline for a little while.

We took a drive down to lake Greenwood, and parked close to a bank, where I could sit and enjoy the sound of the water lapping against the edge just below us. Very calming sound, that is, to me.  There was noise from partying people and others enjoying the day, but it didn't spoil my enjoyment.

We restocked AVON brochures in Ingles, in Mauldin, and delivered to a new customer up on Pelham Road, which gave us a chance to see all the changes up that way, since we had last been up there.

Sleepless Nights, and Progress Reports

For some reason, the past 2 nights have seen me wide awake in the middle of the night, and unable to get back to sleep. Monday night, from just after 2 until around 4am or so, and last night, I again woke around 2 and was still trying to get back to dreamlamd when the alarm went off at 5am. A nap in the day seems to fix the lack of hours of sleep, but it's really not the schedule that I want my body on. Oh well, hopefully tonight will be better.

Roger the Lodger (the stray cat that somehow made it's home in our yard) let me stroke his/her head on Monday and then again yesterday, twice. The second time, almost with a wanting to be petted. I've been putting iced water and food out for him/her. I wish the taming would go quicker, so that we could make a trip to the vet for shots/deworming and defleaing, in one fell swoop, and see if spaying was needed or had already - at some previous time - been done.  

I am getting on pretty well with the My Fitness Pal site, and am thankful it is quite an easy way of keeping track. I think I am going to give their Premium a try, to see if it will allow me to track all my individual vitamins and minerals. It's so hard to guesstimate where I'm at with each during the day, and I have to be on top of all of them, because of the way my body reacts to too much potassium, or B vitamins, magnesium, zinc etc. It's strange how easily one pops a multivitamin daily when younger, yet ends up being able to take only a quarter or a half , and then maybe only twice or three times a week, when older because one's body has decided to go skew whiff.

My front porch "greenhouse" is working well for me. The 2 Lychee plants are growing well. My one surviving spider plant is coming back, my pothos and her now separately-potted babies are flourishing, and I have planted 3 more Lychee pits and 3 Cherry pits. We shall see how they do. In the kitchen, I have 3 more pothos cuttings in Miracle-Gro water, waiting for them to root so that they can then be potted.

It's nice to be growing again and surrounding myself with greenery. I have missed it over the years, but this Spring reawakened something in me, and hubby built my raised beds outside, we cleared off the front porch and kind of made a sunny seated area that I'm also using as a greenhouse, and it's like I've got my groove back.

On Sunday, we spent the afternoon over at my grandson's house and my great-granddaughter, Lily, who is a very independent toddler, came and sat on my lap and we "read" a book together for about 20 minutes. This is the first time that she has even let me hold her. It was a smashing moment.

Poor Kassle, their Great Dane, hated being confined to the kitchen, because of my fear for him. We made progress too, in that, I stood maybe a foot away talking to him, at one point, and then actually stroked him before leaving. I desperately want to lose my fear so that he can relax in HIS home whenever I'm there, he is such a sweet baby, like they always say (and I told him) "it's not you, it's me".

I don't know if it's part of a long-Covid "thing", and I def did not have Covid anywhere near as badly as my husband, but it now seems that I find it harder to focus on certain things. Keeping my thoughts on track, and getting frustrated when I can't, is making working my business, more difficult. The blogs that I do for that require technical input and my brain just feels overwhelmed at even trying to put stuff together. It's annoying, to say the least.

Hubby's long-Covid, as they call it, he still has the shakes sometimes, the raised pulse, and the leg pains. He has the brain-fog and can't remember things a lot of times (joining me with the "Did I? Didn't I? " moments that have encroached on me in recent years). He also still gets the night sweats and general aches. Considering he had what the doctor says was the triumvirate of Covid - brain swelling, hardening of the tissue around the heart, and double pneumonia - as she tells him at every visit, he is a miracle, and lucky to be alive. I'm just thankful he is. I almost lost him in January, and have no idea how I would have dealt with that.

So that's where I'm at in my world, right now. I'm thankful for all my blessings and grateful to be alive.

I May Have Lost Sparkpeople But My Journey Continues

Sparkpeople closed its site 2 days ago, and after tracking all my foods/pills/nutrients/exercise on there for about 10 years, I was suddenly adrift. The idea of starting to get to know a new site and inputting all the data for my personal foods, meds and each and every vitamin and mineral that I track, is daunting, and for now I am just listing each day in an email draft and deleting at day's end. I just don't have the oomph to do all the getting stuff together to copy data off labels, right now. 

My interim system may be lacking but it's simple for right now, and I am pretty good at guestimating the nutrients that I am concerned about. The dietary "rules" I've been following for the past few years have given me that skill, and I am a quite boring foodie, I tend to eat much the same things week in and week out.

My biggest goal at the mo is getting my pedalling back up to 2 hours a day, and my gym workouts to a couple of hours each time. 

Since hubby and I had the Covid stuff going on back in December, with 2 bouts of quarantine courtesy of guys at work, and then him sick a month with it in January, and me losing taste and smell for about a week at the same time, I became quite weary, and regaining my energy has been a slow process.

I noticed I began lagging during my pedalling, and my 30 minute regular sessions weren't happening, I was barely scraping 15 minutes sometimes. I just had no oomph.

Not being able to go to the gym for a couple of months undid all the work I'd done before, and my first days back were daunting. I struggled with lesser weights on various resistance machines, and lesser times on my favourite seated stepper. I am gradually regaining both, but I am not yet where I want to be.

When I do make it to my favourite Planet Fitness in Berea, I make sure to indulge on the hydro-massage bed and in the massage chair. I use both as part of my "health" plan, they help reduce my stress levels and thus my blood pressure, which still continues to act up sometimes.

I just have to keep on keeping on. Slow and steady wins the race, as they say, and I continue to plod on.

A Stressful Week and Busy Weekend

 It just seemed like the stress was never-ending, this past week.  Between the issues with the AVON websites being down, Prisma still hounding us to pay for their drivers taking Mark to the wrong hospital when he had Covid and was in rehab (which we turned over to the States Attorney in May as fraudulent), and a screw up with ebay where our card was charged for transactions that had ebay codes but ebay did not show (THAT was weird!) plus finding out that Paypal has closed our my chicken hut dispute in the seller's favour as they had provided a proof of delivery ... yeah it wasn't very tranquil at all.

So a stress-free, relaxing weekend would have been lovely ... but we had a busy one and hubby is still fiddling with trying to put up the porch fan.  They used to say "no rest for the wicked", well we must be very wicked indeed!

We sold hubby's motorbike yesterday, to a lovely lad who came up from Georgia to get her - and had me worried as it was his first bike and he had a 2 hour ride back.  Like a nagging hen, I had him text me when he got there as I was worried about him.

With everything going on, my blood pressure stayed high, so my activity and productivity has been low, a frustration in itself. Today we have made 2 trips out, to various places, picking up things for projects that are ongoing, and I am now lying on the couch with my legs up in the air, on a stack of cushions. My knees and ankles are so swollen, I ma trying to help the fluid come back out of them.  Ah the joys of getting old.

Here's hoping the upcoming week is more peaceful and I get more done!

Keeping busy

Now that I'm disabled, my hubby would def say that I am a hard taskmaster and not much of a co-worker any more. True, I am very good at telling others what I need to be done, says she!

This weekend, hubby has been really busy, doing stuff out in the yard, and things are def coming together. Yesterday, I had my mate, Kwacha, come over to help him move some roofing tin, and mow (to save him having to) and they uncovered a copperhead. Sadly, Mark had to dispatch it, as it would more than likely have gone after my chickens at some point or one of the feral cats that we feed. I prefer to live and let live, and we've relocated snakes in the past, but this one was bigger and thus more of a danger. 

We picked up 2 banana trees yesterday, as I've wanted some for the longest time. Trying to figure out where to start them off, where (in the future) they can expand and propagate. The lady we got them from has about 30 trees and said she started with 2, and she sells them all the while. I am thinking that might be a part of our future enterprises with hubby nearing retirement.

I am in danger of losing my head if it wasn't screwed on, I think. I have a sprayer outside with a coke/oil/pepper mixture in, to stop aphids and other bugs on my outdoor plants, fruits and veggies; I have one in the kitchen with a light Miracle-Gro solution in for my cuttings ... and the Miracle-Gro one that I had on the porch for my plants there has disappeared totally. Vanished! Gone! I have no idea, I didn't take it off the spot on the window sill other than to squirt the plants, and then that was where I kept it. I have looked indoors and out but it has totally disappeared. I guess I shall have to buy another, it's just convenient for me having them readily available where I need to use them. 

Hubby has been messing with the printer as - all of a sudden - it didn't recognise our wi-fi,  Not being able to print the labels for my AVON books kind of brought my business to a standstill, as the prospect of handwriting all my information on 100 brochures was a non-starter.  My arthritis precludes me doing more than 1 or 2, and the aches for hours afterwards really aren't conducive to it being a consideration. So, I now have 15 pages of labels printed and will be labelling and bagging books, in sessions, for the next couple of days.

Thankful that I have a hubby who can fix things, or I'd be totally adrift without a paddle.

I'm also glad that he's off for the next week, for our anniversary on Tuesday.  Sadly I've had to change our plans due to my health.  My BP has been messing me around so a  long-ish road trip and a train ride, aren't possible right now. Shall just have to plan something else, closer to home. Added to which we have lots of projects going on around here to keep us busy. It's all good, the sleeping in of a morning will be awesome in itself.

Have a great week!