December 23, 2024
Chicago 12, Melborne City, USA
Dear Diary

This Week I…

Waaah! It’s Monday and I’m writing a diary post a day late. This is all wrong and surely heralds the end of days?

Fact is that normally I write this on Sunday mornings, but this Sunday morning I was up and out of the house by 9:15am to watch Mr Chick run 10 miles (or more accurately, drink a cup of coffee and watch Mr Chick finish running 10 miles). Normally in this kind of situation I would write this post on Saturday night and schedule it, but on Saturday I didn’t get home till gone 10pm after a super long day in Guildford playing Roller Derby (more on that later) and frankly I just went straight to bed.

So, I decided that Monday would be diary day this week. Who know what will happen for the rest of the week now we’ve gone all off schedule, but in keeping with last weeks postĀ I am being kind to myself and letting things happen as they will.

Anyway, this week I….

Had a cream tea

Well, technically it might be more accurately called a cream coffee as I had coffee with it. On Sunday we headed out to deliver some leaflets, which involved an exciting exploration of some bits of Norwich I’d never seen before. It’s honestly amazing. You walk down a street you would swear had no houses on it, then discover a tiny alleyway down which there are 14 flats and 2 3-story houses.

Anyway, whilst on this jaunt we spotted a cafe that has been through at least 3 or 4 different iterations in the time we have lived here, and we’ve never been in any of them. So we stopped for a cream tea as a treat.

It wasn’t super exciting, but at least we’ve now been in this place we walk past several times a week. It’s good to have achieved something.

Cleaned the kitchen

Srsly. I would like to pretend this wasn’t the sort of momentous event that needed reporting, but it is.

By cleaned the kitchen I’m not talking a quick wipe down of the surfaces. I’m talking I went to the pound shop and bought microfibre cloths and fancy cleaning products and I took everything off all the surfaces and washed the walls and mopped the floors, and discovered that we’d left the blue plastic protective wrap on the baseboards for the last 5 years (which was good, because I just pulled it off instead of cleaning them).

That kitchen was SHINY. I didn’t want to cook in it ever again, just admire its shininess.

This was a productive use of a bank holiday Monday.

Worked hard (but not too hard)

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’ve been finding it really hard to find a good work/life balance recently. I’ve had a lot on and while it’s not like I’ve been completely glued to my desk, I have been feeling a lot of stress.

Last week I managed to stick to those changes I promised myself I would make and find myself a bit of a better balance.

Part of this was because I knew that Saturday was a really big day as it was our first British Champs Roller Derby game of the season with the Norfolk Brawds and I was determined to go out there ready to fight.

I felt so much better for finding that balance, and I’m determined to keep it up. Even if that means I have to let some things slide more often than I’d like (like Sunday blog posts!)

Smashed it with my Team at British Champs

Not going to lie, the lead up to this game was tough for me. I’m normally super calm and composed, but recently I’ve felt like I’ve been struggling to find my place a little, and super tired at practices, which is part of what prompted those life changes.

Roller Derby is really important to me and my team and I have worked incredibly hard since the end of last season on lots of things that I won’t bore you with. Saturday was the first chance to really put this to the test in a game that mattered, against a tough opponent who’d also been working hard, for the first game of our British Champs season.

I’m happy to say that all our training paid off, and we won the game 316-91.

I literally feel like a weight has been lifted and am now super pumped and determined for the rest of the season. Though I know there’s a WHOLE lot more work to do.

We put everything we’ve worked on into practice and I am proud and a bit soppy. So imma gonna stop writing about this now.

GO TEAM!

Had a delicious breakfast in a school canteen

I guess it’s been a sportsing kind of a weekend, because after driving us all the way back from Guildford on Saturday night, Mr Chick had a 10 mile road race yesterday.

I went along to be supportive, which meant I stood and cheered him across the start line and then went and had a polystyrene cup of coffee and a protein bar in a school canteen for 75 minutes before I went and stood outside again to cheer him across the finish line.

I COULD have illustrated this with a picture of Mr Chicks medal, but that never happened to me. The protein bar and coffee happened to me, so that’s what you get.

I’m also proud to say that Mr Chick ran an excellent time, if he’d run last months Half Marathon in the same pace he’d have cracked that sub 2 hours. The weather was very different, but it’s proof that training did pay off after all!

And that was another week in my life.

How was your week?