I was supposed to get a new hip last week. Got a phone call while I was on the way there that too many staff had come down with COVID and all non-emergency operations had to be cancelled. Le big sigh. I got off the train and sat on the platform* for a while, txting people to share my frustration and, I must admit, letting a few tears fall. But at least I was now able to have breakfast so, silver linings and all that.  It was particularly frustrating because I had worked late the previous two days, trying to get enough stuff finished to make it possible for my bosses to be able to cover my ..read more

Santis over at The Caribbean Dub posted a question yesterday on instagram asking people what kind of subscriptions they have. I confidently replied: €7.99 per month for either Amazon Prime or Netflix most months. I'm going to aim to cut this down to at most six months a year but I'm not sure yet how/when exactly to do that. €30 per month for patreon (supporting The Blindboy Podcast, Laura Kennedy, David McWilliams, Maintenance Phase, Fundie Fridays and Rock the Housework in case anyone is interested) There was a similar thread on the MMM forums recently and so I decided to read that. I also ..read more

Time to take stock and admit to myself that I am in debt again. I haven't been denying it, just pushing it to the back of my head really. There are a couple of reasons but mostly just being careless and spending whatever I felt like over the past month or two, along with one or two bigger ticket items. €320 for an injection into my hip? Yay. Anyway, time to get back of track. I bought a budget calendar from PositiveReduceMyDebt (who I've been following on instagram for a couple of months now) and have filled out some goals for January.  15 no-spend days Stick to €25/week for food (given ..read more

I went for a PCR test* this morning, which meant a badly-needed 20 minutes extra sleep. Then I got there 10 minutes early but they were already set up so they swabbed me immediately. They swabbed my throat instead of my nose and my very difficult to swab nose is very grateful. Because I was finished there so quickly, I had time to stop at the clinic in town on the way to work and pick up the prescription I thought I might not be able to get until the new year. The shop that actually makes the orthotics wasn't open but when I asked the porter if there was a letterbox, not only did he show me w ..read more

Just a quick note for posterity. Today was my first official day eating food again after 12 weeks (we won't mention the holiday). I had to get bloodwork done in the morning so I didn't get to have my breakfast (a meal replacement drink) until almost eleven o'clock. I did sneak in a Milky Way on the way back to the office from the clinic, though. Not at all in the plan but I felt like I needed to have something to make my mind believe not immediately flip out and start eating all the things. For lunch, at around half past one, I had a serving of the pumpkin soup I made at the weekend (50.5 kcal ..read more

Today is the final day of the 'fasting' portion of the optifast programme. From tomorrow, we will eat four pouches/meal replacements per day and replace the fifth pouch with a meal that has 200 calories and 15-20g of protein.  I kept to the fasting regime really well, far better than I expected. And then three weeks ago I went on holidays for two weeks and, well, I did not keep to the fasting regime. I mean, I didn't discard it entirely but I did decide to eat some things while I was in Ireland. Not large amounts of things, and I definitely felt it in having an uncomfortable tummy for the ..read more

So I'm going to do something I don't much like doing and post from my phone. Perhaps it will help me to be more concise.  This week has been a bit up and down. I had my first online yoga class on Monday and once again was filled with horror (and shame) at how restricted my body is when it comes to movement. Mind you, when we did the first downward facing dog I thought I'd never manage (and that was my favourite the one other time I did yoga years ago), but it sort of worked. Getting out of it again was tough. But by the end of the hour, when we had done it four or five times, it actually ..read more

The week has flown by, another week full of activity. I discussed this a bit with my counsellor this morning and she's going to work on it with me over the next few months. I'm handling everything pretty well at the moment but the overwhelm never feels very far away and I'd really like to try and work on learning to catch it and pull back on doing so many things before it goes too far and I'm back to not being able to do much of anything at all. Having said that, I'm pretty sure I'm going to try going back to choir when the winter semester kicks off in a few weeks.  Random photo of ..read more

Housekeeping has been a very sore spot for a long time now. I was delighted to find The Organised Mum Method and app and I have used it more consistently that just about any other plan I ever came up with. However, after a good burst of starting to get back to it earlier this year, my back was so sore that I did nothing for a couple of months. Looking back through my app history I can see that I actually started on 14 November 2020 and kept going up to 31 March 2021. Then I picked it up again from 24 April to 25 May. That is more than I thought I had done. And on some days I even finished ever ..read more

Well, I'm halfway through week 5 of the optifast program. Weightloss is going well and I'm not particularly suffering from pangs of hunger at all. Just every now and again when I haven't planned properly or something strange happens, usually with public transport. Like yesterday when I switched to wait for my tram - I had just missed one but the next was due in 12 minutes. And then none actually turned up for more than 40 minutes. Very unusual for here but it meant that I was more than an hour later getting home than planned. But it is definitely good to have a small amount of delayed gratific ..read more