KJ Charles fans

I have reviewed my ALL THE THINGS LIST and still think I can make real gains before the end of the year.

#ORJENISE100 carrying on and will complete in October. My space feels a little lighter even though I only got through half the prompts. Worth completing!

HOME: spent most of last week at the cottage - left home at 4:15am Monday morning when the roads were quiet and was in Tesco's in Bangor by 9:30am which is pretty impressive. For comparison left the cottage at 3:15pm on Friday and got home at 9:30pm. It was lovely to have the time away even though working. I got a tiny bit of gardening done, the cats travelled well and I now have another list of things to sort out when next up there at the end of the month! Back at the flat I have blitzed my kitchen, hall/landing/stairs and bathroom clean and am about to start on the chaos of my bedroom.

HEALTH: knees still aching - possibly as a result of long drive Friday. Need to get flu shot booked in this month and debating whether to pay for Covid shot as it seems to be doing the rounds at work.

LIFE ADMIN: hold onto your hats - I have started to check my current pension status. I've misplaced the login details to my Civil Service and Social Housing schemes so asked for those. The first part of my TLS scheme looks OK but I do need to find the second part after they switched suppliers. My Local Govt scheme is OK though I should increase my contributions or buy AVCs. Things seem a bit better than I expected and I'm glad TLS had a good scheme and I was able to have a few years adding 20% of my take home pay thanks to their matching policy. Why the sudden push? A seminar last week by the LGPS scheme which set out how much income you need for a basic or comfortable retirement which was, quite frankly, scary!

DIGITAL DECLUTTER: this is a combo of #orjenising things, getting my life admin sorted but also dedicating some time to dealing with the massive amount of stuff I have digitally. I have multiple of email accounts - there's my main one, a back up and my fandom related one just on the top of the pile. I'd had my main Gmail since the early 2000s and there was (last year) over 35,000 emails in there plus a G:drive full of docs. I've done a bit of dedicated sorting over the last few weeks and am down to just under 13,000 archived emails and transferring important things over to Dropbox. I've been unsubbing from mailing lists, or setting them up to my backup account (so I can have one account for Important Things and one for Everything Else) and it seems to be working. My back up account is in very good order. I hope to get to the fandom related account over Christmas. I also had over 1000 images on my phone - so many pics of cats, garden, allotment and epic amounts of screenshots. It'll probably take me most of October to sort those out and then I'm scheduling a monthly image review in my diary!

GARDENING/ALLOTMENTING: at the cottage I planted up some flower beds and cut backs the herbs. I Still have remaining winter pots to plant at the flat, as well as sorting out a load of new house plants and the allotment. It's been too wild to do much outside the last two days (thanks to Storm Amy) but may try to work from home on Wednesday and take a long lunch break to finish the winter pots.

COOKING/EATING: ate like a queen at the cottage - duck breasts, sea bass and ribeye steak were features of the week away. Decent meals every evening and lovely lunches and I ate pretty much everything I bought plus a lot of the fruit/veg I took with me. Also discovered I really like persimmons. Cancelled the Oddbox which should have arrived on Friday as I still had plenty of fruit and veg at home so have time to eat down my courgette, onion and potato gluts as well as empty the fruit bowl. About to make a big pot of something to feed me for a few days and then either a Thai green curry or Keralan Prawn curry midweek.

READING/LISTENING: Not reading/ listening at the moment - been too busy!

WATCHING: dumping a lot of my viewing as the autumn shows are coming back I find myself oddly lacking in enthusiasm to watch them. I signed up for a free trial of Acorn TV and blitzed my way through the two most recent seasons of Whistable Pearl and then all four seasons of Harry Wild. Might keep it for one more month then cancel. Have cancelled Disney+ - meant to do it for ages but the recent debacle was the final straw.

CREATING/LEARNING: still here -> summer has been nuts at work so hardly any time for crochet club or other creative endeavours.

CATS: all good. They travelled very well to the cottage and the passenger seat of the car is now covered in cat hair.

VOLUNTEERING: recent committee meeting was short and productive. The only task I have arising from it is to be around on the morning of Friday 24 for a skip drop off and be present on Saturday 25 that for a work day. Which means I should be free Sunday 25 to drive to the cottage.

SOCIALISING: not last week.

WORK: still hoping October may be a bit quieter than March through September have been! Though this coming week looks full on but the following two might be easing off a bit especially with the new way of doing inspections agreed at the last reps meeting.

Plans for this afternoon include my bedroom, cooking, and sorting house plants. If the wind drops possibly a little bit of tidying the front garden.

Backdating this to 1st Oct because I meant to post before bed and forgot!

The world is on fire everywhere and I'm mostly continuing to deal with that via Twitter, Threads and Instagram and trying to keep over here focused on the good things or attempts to do good things.

On that note

I signed up for Action for Happiness's Optimistic October and the task for day 1 was to write down 3 things you're looking forward to this month so mine are:

1. Seeing two films which are part of the BFI film festival with ravurian on 18 and 19 October.

2. Our community work day at my allotment site on 25 October

3. Coming back to the cottage at the end of this month to work a week remotely again.

Having only managed half the prompts in the September round of #orjenise100 on Insta I'll be carrying on through October. However 183 items left my flat so I'm counting it a success. As well as picking up the missing prompts I'm also looking at bitesizedcleaning's Organisational October challenge. The task for the 1st October was to make a plan and I'm using my ever evolving To Do List for that!

And I've transformed Project 65 days (do as much as I can of my To Do's by end of Sept) into Project 92 days (keep going until end of December) and plan to do at least 4 things a day which are either tasks from To Do List or are part of Optimistic/Organisational October.

On that note yesterday:

1. I organised and deleted email from a couple of subfolders on my main email account. Now down to a total of 14,792 emails, 14,700 of which are archived in subfolders. Down from over 35,000 last year so it is progress!

2. Cleared up my free Canva account so I can see the images I really need and deleted the rest.

3. As I'm here in Wales and away from London and the flat I did some gardening, sorting out two flowerbeds (cut back overgrown plants, planted some autumn colour and bulbs for spring) and cut back the herb bed.

4. Signed 4 petitions - I already donate a healthy chunk of cash each month to a number of charities and would bankrupt myself if I threw cash at every deserving cause - but I do have time to sign petitions and write to my MP and councillors. So 4 petitions signed yesterday. Need to keep a proper track of these!

Small steps.