June??

How did that happen?

I mean obviously, the Earth kept spinning and moving round the Sun, but seriously, this year is the longest I’ve ever known and I can’t believe we’re in June already.

I was going to get the garden sorted out— front and back. I hate gardening for more than an hour at a time, so that makes it hard to accomplish much.

I was going to lay a concrete path. I got all but the last part done, which should only take an hour at most to do, but I can’t seem to convince myself to do it.

I was going to spend time learning a language or brushing up on German or French. I laughed when I found my old language CDs I got when working for Holland America, because I’d forgotten at the time I was going to learn Dutch (for the Engineers) and Italian (for the Officers).

I was going to lose weight. And I have been, slowly. under 100kgs yesterday for the first time in a year. But I could have been more disciplined if I didn’t keep learning how to cook macarons and bakewell tart and so on.

I was going to paint the house. And here, I’d say, is the major success of this unwanted unemployment. Except even there, I’ve got about fifteen minutes of work left, I need to edge one wall in my room, but it’s been sitting like that for… shit, three weeks.

Writing. I’ve been chipping away. 3 pages a day. On some days. Enough that I’m half-way through an episode of a new TV series. But 28 pages isn’t all that much in the grand scheme of things, especially when I get most of my writing done before noon these days.

In fact, I get most of everything done before noon. Shopping? Check. When I do it, which isn’t often, and is much quicker than it used to be. Laundry, check, cos then it goes on the drying rack in the yard. Swimming, check, although that’s only a recent development as the pool is now warm enough before the sun hits it in the morning.

So the rest of the day is spent streaming movies, streaming music, and finding excuses not to open a bottle of wine or pour myself a gin. I need a deadline, something to point towards, to know when this will all finish, so I can motivate myself better. But now it’s fucking June, and things are opening up, and cases aren’t going down, and a lot of the opening plans seem like wishful thinking right now. I spend the afternoons trying not to think about things, about what comes next, trying to distract myself.

And that’s what this blog was. A distraction for myself from everything that’s going on in this country right now. So many thoughts, but they’ve been said by people more positioned to speak on the issues, and more eloquent than I. But maybe I should start politicking on here again. It sure as shit would give me stuff to write about. We shall see.