Nic Dempsey

Happy Monday!

So there’s a translation of the Book of Job, where God lays into Job for questioning Him. In most translations, Job is repentant in the face of God’s power and majesty. In this one Job replies “I have heard you and now my eye has seen you. That is why I am fed up.”

I love this. It reminds me that God wants relationship with all of us, all our good and bad, he did not create us to be automatons, obedient to His will. God created us for relationship, with Him and with each other and He gave us free will so we can choose that relationship.

I’ve spent considerable chunks of my time depressed, to get out of that hole, one of the things I did was remind myself to be grateful (example from 2015 here), it does work but it sucks to have to list all the good things when you feel terrible and useless, at some point in the recitation of things for which I am grateful, I feel ok with a ‘and yet Lord, I am fed up’.

This rather long explanation is a way of explaining that last week was a ‘and yet’ week.

Why? Well, November, the state of the world, and every little thing going wrong. On Monday, the IT at work stopped, on Tuesday, it was three hours with IT separate from the global IT issues at work, on Wednesday, the reservation I booked for Friday’s team meal was cancelled (we found out via an article in the Southampton Echo not from the restaurant!) and I had to scramble to find a new booking (I did it but not without having to contact14 restaurants!), and the office move due to happen at the weekend, that I’d been working on was postponed for a week. Postponement has been a thing this week, on Thursday, it was announced that the new kitchen would not be in situ for Christmas as I had been told, but work will start in January instead (yes had I spent last week accommodating my mind to moving out for two weeks in December). My stress levels were such that I bought two bottles of gin and another cast iron pot in Lidl, but I managed to wrestle Thursday to a win with organisation (I have a very organised fridge with all veggies prepped!)

I was feeling confident about Friday, I was up at 5am, to get a bus at 6.10am to the station. Except that the bus didn’t turn up and that ticket machine at the station didn’t’ work and I didn’t get to Southampton until 8:53 and not at 8:35 as planned. Which threw my day into more of a scramble than intended.

Then the trains on the way home were broken. So on Friday I arrived home at 11-ish and it had been a day!

Worse things happen at sea and no one died but it was not my favourite week!

This week, I’m hoping for less mishaps, I’m in the office Monday and Tuesday, walking with Sue on Wednesday and who knows what else for the rest of the week. Next Sunday is the first Sunday of Lent so then it gets serious, and I need to clean the oven before then!

Have a good week!

This weekend was the Pumpkin Walk, I did a solid 5 hours on the booze stall and we ran out of beer (again!), I think my back still hurts from 5 hours standing but it was a really good event and well received by most of the people who came.

Ma doesn’t attend either of the allotment open days anymore, so I wasn’t expecting to do a lot of allotment work this weekend, but on Friday afternoon the 30 strawberry plants I ordered turned up. So on Saturday morning , I filled the strawberry planter, I’d bought for this purpose. I’d ordered another on Friday because I knew that we needed two. Each planter holds 18 plants, I’d ordered 30 new plants, knowing that I had five in the bath, so that would be fine.

On Sunday, I went back to the plot to tidy up the Halloween decorations and plant the other twelve up. A quick count of the bathtub strawberries revealed that the 5 original plants are now at least 10, if not twelve, so I’ll order another planter and sort that out in a week or two. My working plan is to have a planter to plant any runners into each year on a five year cycle, let’s just see how that goes.

The theme of the year seems to be very warm and we are having a very warm October, this is giving some of the plants ideas. The roses are flowering beautifully and the nasturtiums that struggled all winter are starting to flower too. In the poly, I’m overwhelmed with ripening tomatoes and the salad beds are doing well. There is self-seeded dill all over the ex-cucumber bed, that’s now got swede in it, I’m going to let it do it’s thing until the cold comes!

I also managed to feed the birds. We stopped doing fat balls in the spring as they weren’t getting eaten but we’ve put them back in for the winter. We’ve got two suet feeders, two fat ball feeders and two peanut feeders and it’s going to cost us, but on Sunday I was really chuffed to see how many birds were around and using the feeders, so we’ll carry on doing it.

Next week, I’m also solo on the plot and I need to plant more garlic and the tulip and fritillary bulbs that need to go in the ground too, I want to cover the empty beds or sow mustard or something on them too. Then I’m all about the weeding!