Back to Edinburgh yesterday, after a couple of weeks’ holiday. The crunch of coming back is not so bad, although the quality of greyness this morning made me realise why some people decamp abroad for the entire winter…Admittedly, we’ve been spoiled, with quite a lot of sunshine and heat in the south of France, followed by sunshine and warmth in the north of Italy.
Decided we’d have the weekend at home, so doing a certain amount of pottering. This has even gone to the lengths of clearing out dead spices from the kitchen cupboards. Not so exciting, but it makes me realise my ‘anticipate exciting food by buying herbs and spices’ habit needs to be checked up on every now and then. Thankfully none of it was crawling out of the cupboards by itself, but our bin will smell of a weird combination of flavours for a little while, no doubt.
I guess that when we’ve been away, it’s nice to get to know one’s home again, and pottering about helps in this. Seeing it all with fresh eyes also helps for clearing out stuff that you’ve been putting off doing before going away (if not for months before, I suspect).
One aspect of taking stock is to think about doing something with the garden again, rather than looking out the window at it, feeling tired, and going off to do something else. Having been inspired by our friends’ veg patch, and having rediscovered a few pots for growing things on window sills, perhaps I’ll start small over the winter, and actually get some gardening done in the spring.
One exciting discovery today was what’s on offer for food digesters. Rather than leaving it to me and Dan to digest everything (ha, we’ll give it a try), you can get bin things for the garden which allow you to get rid of food waste, even bones, fish skin, etc, rather than bin it. This immediately suggests an end to our kitchen bin getting smelly, a surge of interest in cooking roast chicken regularly, and provides a further incentive to create a new bit of the garden in front of our shed, where it gets the most sun. I suspect in practice it will involve prevailing on my mum and Dan’s, who actually know what they’re doing in the garden, but it’s another reason to feel positive about the garden.
Talking to Dan’s mum on the phone today, aware that I have less of a sense than usual of what will be waiting for me when I get back to work, now that there are new colleagues to return, potential to give away a further chunk of work when I’ve tied it up, and some new activities in investigating staff learning for the wider team I’m part of. Maybe it will mean I genuinely can have a bit more time at home too, plan for things, rather than work always dictating what’s possible in my home life.
Taking stock. Moving on to making stock tomorrow.Â