#30 Slow start

Update #30 Published on update

After a week of holiday with family coming over to visit, I am back to my routine. Getting back to work felt intense. The things I am currently working on are quite interesting, but I felt exhausted at the end of each day. I'm not complaining though, I only have 3-day-work weeks from now on until the end of my contract.

3-day-work weeks means that I have a lot of free time. I have many DIY projects I want to pursue1, but often feel blocked by one thing or another. For instance, finding the material is a big hurdle. It might be because I am trying to upcycle too much instead of just buying new raw material.

Another hurdle is that the woodworking workshop is right next to the neighbors' house2. One of their doors actually connects to the workshop. I find myself tiptoeing and trying to make as little noise as possible whenever I go there. This makes it hard to use that room at all.

I might need to be more patient and simply progress one step at a time, wherever I have control. These shelves, clothes hangers and curtain holders are not that urgent to build.

Experiments

Making cereal bars

As the weather is getting better, we are doing more and more sporty outdoorsy activities. Whenever we have cereal bars at home, I usually bring them as snacks. For the first time last week, I tried making my own cereal bars. So far, I am not 100% convinced by the recipe I tried — they were a bit too soft and didn't contain enough honey to my taste. However, I am pretty sure I can get it right after a few tries. I don't know why I didn't think of making these cereal bars earlier, as the ingredients are so simple3.

Gardening

Robin did a lot of gardening work these last few weeks —  and I helped him here and there. I can already see that he is going to be the gardening-person out of us two. I do like it, but prefer the cooking-and-eating-the-veggies part. So far, we have a few strawberry and arugula plants on our terrace, six zucchini plants in the lower garden, 12 salads in the greenhouse. There are some more plants in France's garden that we are helping with as well.

Footnotes

  1. You should see my to-do list. ↩

  2. It's actually another couple that France kindly took in, a bit like us. ↩

  3. Basically, you just need to use granola ingredients. ↩

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