Monthly Archives: October 2018

#MyTime Week 14 – Having a plan!

Slow-flowing honey

I’m always a little late in the season by the time I get round to finishing off spinning honey and bottling it.  So, it’s not unheard of that late October I am bottling the final jars of honey from that season and that was my job for today.

I’m working during the week so don’t always get enough time in an evening to do those sorts of jobs and so, last weekend, when I put the last bucket of honey into the settling tank, ready for bottling, I should have planned to bottle it very soon as it had already started to set.

Well, it wasn’t really a big surprise, when I came to bottling it today, that it was pretty slow to flow through the tap.

I thought I would have to resort to scooping it out but, after a little coaxing at the tap-end, and a lot of patience, I ended up with 15lbs of “semi-set” honey.

It made me think.  If my time is precious, which it is, then I need to plan properly to make the most of what time I have.  I still managed a few domestic chores and sowing the broad beans today but I really hadn’t expected to spend most of the afternoon encouraging honey to flow.

So, for #MyTime week 14, it is to make sure I have a plan to make the most of #MyTime even if maybe I won’t always stick to it.

#MyTime Week 13 – Gentle Veg Gardening

What a wonderful sunny October day it’s been today.  The weather both yesterday and today has been a really good extended Summer treat.

And this weekend I have enjoyed a little gentle vegetable gardening, clearing one end of a raised bed to discover a few hidden potatoes missed at the last harvest, tidying up the tomato bed and harvesting the last of the french beans.  I had planned to remove all of the tomatoes but there are lots still to come so a little tidy up has made them a little easier to harvest.

So tonight’s roast dinner will include home-grown beans, carrots and potatoes – yes, that is certainly something I want to continue for #MyTime.

And an added bonus in the garden (tweeted from my other account) was a wonderful display from a hummingbird hawk month – a frequent visitor to the garden this Summer.

#MyTime Week 12 – Crafting Stories

This week’s #MyTime theme has been a little elusive.  In previous weeks, I was able to select things that had presented themselves to me during the week past or for the week to come.  But this week, well I’ve been doing many of the things that I’ve already noted – seeing family, reading, singing, bottling honey – so I wondered if some of these weeks in the countdown to 60 might be revisiting themes.  That may well be true as I go through the process but I think there is something else that is important for me to capture as a #MyTime theme, and something this website had been established to fulfill.  And that is crafting stories.  I did a year-long Twitter project (#Talein10) to write a tale in ten words each day in an attempt to keep open the story door within lots of time constraints and I haven’t done as much as I would have liked since then but now is the time to set out that intention.

When I have time, I’d like to fill in some of the gaps in my grandfather’s story of The Long Walk and there are many more stories for me to craft, re-discover and tell.

So, #MyTime at minus 29 weeks of my countdown is “Crafting Stories”.

#MyTime Week 11 – Reading: Novels

Having spent the summer months finishing a few great reads – by novelists Diane Chamberlain, Joanne Harris, Christina McKenna and Adam Croft and now fresh into a novel by Ruth Dugdall – I have resolved that reading is definitely a pastime I want to continue and use any spare #MyTime I have available.  And it is novels I enjoy immersing myself in most of all.

Quite often other things take up precious time and any books I am reading are visited fairly infrequently but of late I have dipped in at any available moment and been happy to spend a snatched ten minutes or half-hour which in turn has made me want to dip in again, soon.  So maybe I have found a way that I can read a lot more and more often even if only in short spans of time.  But, hey, that’s OK.