It’s Sunday again, and not only have I not started on this week’s blog; I never even finished last week’s 😕. I’ve sat down to write several times, and did, in fact, start writing last weekend, but I’m having trouble organizing my thoughts, let alone getting anything coherent in writing.

I’ve been struggling with a fair bit of anxiety these last couple of weeks. We’re trying to do so much – cleaning up the house, writing a blog, making and editing videos, keeping up with four different social media channels, navigating life in a new place – trying to establish new routines, new friendships… just figuring out groceries is a challenge. Also, the weather has been terrible – many grey, rainy, overcast days in the 40’s, which has a tendency to negatively affect both my mental and physical health.

I’ve spent a lot of time these weeks trying to figure how to manage social media. I really only use Facebook for myself, which I have something of a love/hate relationship with 😂. I have an Instagram account, but hardly ever go on there, and I didn’t even have a TikTok before now. I use YouTube frequently for specific things and follow specific people as a viewer and consumer…so trying to figure out how to become a social media creator, and actually get engagement, is overwhelming. And of course, we have to work on the house to make the videos to have content to post…it’s a lot 🙃

I haven’t tackled a major house project in a few weeks. The only thing I’ve really accomplished was cleaning the hall where the washer and dryer are. I didn’t take before pictures, or any video…I thought about it, but decided it was such a small project that it wasn’t really worth it… It’s a small space, but washing 10′ walls is never a small project 😳🙃😂. Up and down the ladder, vacuum, wash, take down and wash the light fixture and all the artwork… this ‘small’ project took several hours, over a couple of days 🫠

James has been more productive; working on the third-floor loft bedroom (with lots of help from our friend Jerry). The man who lived here before us, the son of a close friend of my aunt, used the room as a sometimes music studio sometimes bedroom, sometimes…bathroom, apparently 🤢. So, the room was emptier of stuff than many of the other rooms. It was, however, also grosser than any of the other rooms. James (and Jerry!) dealt with the grossest of the gross shortly after we moved in.

Then we mostly, if not entirely, ignored that room while we worked on all the other stuff I’ve previously written about 🙃.

Since we moved in, we had been spending most of our non-working hours on the porch. Inside, the only places to sit are the kitchen and the formal living room… which has been ingrained in me since I was a child is not a place to hang out 😂. With the changing weather and increasing need for an indoor hangout space, James returned to the loft room to clean it up for that purpose.

One problem with using the loft room as a hangout is that the internet up here is spotty at best. I’ve tried working on the blog on more than one occasion, only to have the internet be so bad I couldn’t even open WordPress 🙄. This feels like a silly reason to be more than a week late, but it’s definitely part of it…I like writing in my chill space. I tried to write in the kitchen or living room, but didn’t get very far. So, here I am writing about Halloween over a week late 🤷🏻‍♀️.

This week was our first Halloween in the house (as a family, anyway – I had a few here when I was a kid!), and the first time in a long time that we’ve lived anywhere that other people could see our house, so we were excited to decorate!

Next year I think we need bigger decorations outside – these ones kind of just get lost in the immensity of the house 🤣

My aunt and I spent a fair bit of time in the days before Halloween working on Iris’s costume (Charmander). It came out perfectly – Iris was very happy and got lots of compliments!

Oh, and also – we got cats! Our beloved Bleu kitty, whom we had had for thirteen years, passed away peacefully this summer, not long before we moved. We knew we would want to get a new cat once we were settled in, and that day came a couple of weeks ago. We had been talking about getting a kitten before Bleu passed, so I so thinking we’d get an adult cat now, then think about getting a kitten in a year or so when the house is a bit more put together…that’s not quite how things worked out 😂

At the cat shelter, James and Jade both immediately fell for a sleek, svelte, almost completely black cat with a little bit of an attitude. Iris and I, on the other hand, fell in love with a snuggly grey tabby with gorgeous spiral stripes and mitten toes. The shelter worker overheard us discussing which to get, and suggested we get both 😻. Once the suggestion was made, we couldn’t get away from it. If we had gone home with only one cat, half of us would have gone home disappointed 😿… so both cats came home with us!

There is still some disagreement about the cat’s names…they came from the shelter as Todd (tabby) and Amira (black), and we didn’t plan to change them. However, after just a couple days, James christened the black cat Zaphod, because she’s got two heads 😂. She is one of these cats that can be very sweet and loving, but turn bite you when she’s done being pet 😹. Then, once we had Zaphod, it only made sense for the other cat to be Arthur Dent. We decided on Dentarthurdent (per Slartibartfast, iykyk) because it’s funnier 😻😹. The girls, not being Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fans, don’t get it, and still insist on calling the kitties Todd and Amira …we’ll just see what sticks, I guess 🤷🏻‍♀️