This Week I…..

Moooorning! How are you today?

Out of my window it looks like the force nine gales may be subsiding and the spring-like weather returning. I hope so at least because today’s plans include a 10 mile run (for Mr Chick, mine will be much shorter) and a jolly trip out to a pub to watch some Rugby and celebrate the fact that today marks 6 months since Mr Chicks last day in the corporate world.

In other news, this week I…..

Finally got my flower fix

One of my favourite things about this time of year is that spring flowers arrive in the shops and I can have daffodils in my house for next to nothing. Daffodils remind me of my Nana, and they’re super cheerful. Who can be miserable with daffodils in the house?

So a couple of weeks ago I bought my first bunch of the year from Tesco. Many of them looked slightly open already, but I bought the most bud like bunch I could find, bought them home and put them in water on a Sunday afternoon. They opened a little, and then by Tuesday they were all dead and wilted.

That is not cheering.

This week Mr Chick came home with another bunch for me, and these ones have done their job, opened up and looked cheerful. Roll on Spring!

Drank some beer

We actually saved up all month for this, can you believe it? The National Winter Ales Festival was being hosted by the Norwich Branch of CAMRA this year, and was at the end of February, which meant we had to budget to make sure we didn’t spend all our money at the beginning of February like we normally do.

We went on a Wednesday afternoon, because we are both self-employed and we can do that now. We spent a jolly afternoon trying a multitude of wintery type ales, eating pork pies and generally getting a bit tipsy.

It was a welcome relief from day-to-day stresses.

Got some Culture

Wednesday was a fun packed day, because that evening we had been invited to the launch of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. The NNF is an arts festival that obligingly falls around our birthday each year. The Spiegeltent goes up in Chapelfield Gardens and free and paid arts events happen all around the city.

This years program sounds very exciting, and we got to top up our tipsiness with some free fizz.

Being super tipsy from the beer I was hoping no one would try to have a serious conversation with me, and for once everything worked out in my favour and the only people I spoke to were people a couple of my friends who are organising one of the shows at this years festival (Night Magic, check it out!) and they already know I’m an idiot so that’s fine.

Cursed Doris

Thursday was an absurdly stressful day. I had to do lots of hard brain things and it left me feeling all fuzzy-headed, so I was looking forward to Roller Derby practice that night so I could go and hit some people to get it out of my system.

Then it was cancelled because stupid storm Doris blew down a tree in our venues car park. Srsly. I play an indoor sport and Doris STILL managed to cancel it.

Instead I watched some people far better at Roller Derby than I am on You Tube in the hope that it would rub off.

It wasn’t the same.

Learnt some things I had no interest in learning

Things no one tells you about blogging number 403456, unless you have the money to pay someone to do all the technical stuff you are going to have to learn to do a whole load of stuff you really would rather not have to.

My website has been having some server-side problems, high memory spikes and no one knows what is causing it. No one still does, but the first thing was to make sure everything was running as it should. So this week I upgraded my server from EasyApache3 to 4, whatever that is, and moved to PHP7 and reinstalled all my WordPress core files and all sorts of other incredibly dull things.

This involved me doing things like learning to connect to my server using SSH, which wasn’t as easy as just following the instructions, because these things never are. Inevitably whenever I find a nice walk-through on how to do something I get to a certain point and am faced with big red messages telling me that obviously THAT didn’t work because of other things I don’t understand, and then I have to go off and learn what they are and fix them before I can do the other thing that was supposed to be simple.

Anyway, it gave me a headache, I was very stressed, and also doing these things wasn’t on my already packed “To Do” lists, which meant I still had to find time to fit in all the other stuff.

Maybe I shouldn’t have taken a day off to go drink beer after all?

Was absurdly tired

Honestly, I don’t know if it’s because I’m so stressed at the moment, or because I have a disease previously unknown to medical science, but this week I have been permanently exhausted.

I could literally go to bed at 8:30 every night and get up at 8:30 the following morning. Roller Derby practice yesterday felt absurdly hard, the whole session was like skating through treacle.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?

Maybe more coffee would help?

Anyway, now that I have finished complaining about my #firstworldproblems (boo hoo, you’re a bit tired) I’m going to head off and enjoy the rest of my Sunday.

How was your week?