Life Lately #105

Manchester Northern Quarter

Hello sweetpeas, how are you doing? It’s been an awfully long time since I wrote a little catch up post on what’s been going on. So I’m using the opportunity to rebrand to ‘life lately’ instead of Monday Catch-Ups and then it gives me the flexibility of posting on other days. But the concept is still the same, taking time to reflect on all the little things. Kind of like an online diary/gratitude reminder. Because the days go by so fast and often they’re bogged down with drudgery. It’s only when you stop to take everything in that you realise there can be a lot of happiness in every day.

So what have we been up to? I’m not going to focus on why I lost my passion for just about everything for around 4 months because this post explains it well enough. All that matters is that I’m excited again, about pretty much everything.

The House

We’ve finally, finally, had a first meeting with a potential architect to redesign our ground floor and plan a kitchen extension build. It’s exciting but nerve-wracking all at the same time. And the process seems SO long. But we have to start somewhere, we’re going to reach out to at least one more if not two and get some plans drawn up. This will help us secure the finance and move forward. It’s unlikely anything will happen this year but next year should be go, go, go.

We’re also working on other rooms in the house. An electrician is coming today to start working on the living room improvements, we’re having downlighters installed and new plug sockets plus a few outdoor jobs. Once he’s finished we can move forward with replastering.

On Friday, more new windows arrive for one of our spare bedrooms, the first floor landing and top floor landing. I can’t wait to not be looking through diamond leading any more. I can easily lose patience with how long it takes us to get things done but when we do, it’s all worth it.

Travel

We *may* have been away. Once or twice. Although the problem now is that everyone else is about to go on their summer holidays and ours are already done. We had enough of the long winter and disappeared for two weeks in March to Kuala Lumpur and Langkawi. I still haven’t written about it yet so that’s on my very long to-do list but it was blissful. It was also a long overdue break to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary which was actually last July.

Then we had a long weekend in Berlin a couple of weeks ago, so I could go and groupie-stalk Guns N’ Roses. Pete is so patient with me. You can see why I love Berlin here, definitely one of my favourite cities.

Now we’ve just come back from an overnight to Manchester to see Billy Joel at Old Trafford. Which was ace, even if I did feel like the youngest person there by 20 years. It’s not often I can say that!

So there aren’t really any travel plans in the calendar now until October when we’ll take Maddie to the Cotswolds for our annual doggie holiday. We need to rectify this, immediately. Travel keeps me sane in an insane world. Even just a couple of days somewhere in the UK would be perfect.

Life

Life in general all of a sudden feels exciting again. It’s amazing isn’t it how you can be so deeply affected by one particular area? I need to get back into my exercising and healthy eating because there’s definitely a chubby Lins tummy on the horizon and I always feel so much happier and more motivated when I’m healthy. Since we came back from Malaysia Pete has been more-or-less following a vegan food lifestyle and it makes life much easier. We’ve been trialling new cookbooks and heading off to vegan markets. It’s amazing just how much is out there but the vegan junk food movement is HUGE and it’s easy to get sucked in.

I’ve been trialling yoga too. I’ve now completed two sets of courses with the lovely Luisa at Spitalfields City Farm on Saturday mornings. The new 4 week course starts this coming Saturday and focuses more on mindfulness and meditation in conjunction with yoga so I’m really looking forward to that. Overall yoga isn’t for me in the same way that I found a love for Pilates but it all helps with mental health and well-being and that’s a winner in my book.

The Blog

There was a time when I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with this space. It felt like the more negative I felt about everything, the more the collaborations and opportunities dried up. I didn’t know what to write about and had no inclination to put finger to keyboard. But then as if by magic it all started falling back into place and I could literally spend the next 48 hours writing solidly without a break. I feel so passionate and excited again it’s almost paralysing. This is what used to happen when I was little and had a birthday party – the morning of the party I would always be physically sick with excitement and honestly, I can waste a lot of time right now pondering how I’m going to cover everything I want to but it’s a very good problem to have.

So there we go, a whistle-stop tour of the last few months condensed into a few paragraphs. I’m so so happy to be back. Maybe the break was needed, maybe it wasn’t. All I know is that life is there to be grabbed with both hands and I’m going to do just that.

Follow me on Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest | Twitter

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *