There are many situations in life when it is necessary to apologize, but there are times when sorry just doesn’t cut it!
Like when you’re trying to rescue a spider out of the bath and are armed with glass and paper and the little bugger moves at the last second. You panic and plunge with the glass, unceremoniously amputating a couple of its legs… for the spider this is one of those occasions.
For me the situation I find myself in, may not be like losing a limb, but still I think the fact that I haven’t written a blog in 18 months, might also be filed firmly under the heading ‘Where the fuck have you been’ and ‘no you’re right, sorry just doesn’t cut it’!
But I am sorry! Not only because you of course have been desperate to hear what’s going on in my life, but also because now I am faced with the problem of how to update one and a half years in one blog…
I thought of writing it in sections over the course of a few blogs, but then I’d just get behind again for the future, I think this is called the circle of bloglife…
I thought of doing a picture story, month by month and even spent some time downloading the most relevant images from each of the 18 months I’ve missed… but this could get very very long and I’m not sure I could hold your interest throughout my brain dump.
So I thought I’d keep it simple.
In summary: We renovated our kitchen – see the video here of how it looks now! (Note it does start with a red screen it’s not you!)
There were things that happened in between the days we were working on this, like we bought some scooters and had some fun days exploring the countryside, I did some watercolour paintings that actually sold (which is amazing), we went to Sicily to complete on the sale of our house, I got my Bulgarian driving licence, we attended an art exhibition for our very talented Russian friend, I went to a music festival in the mountains, tried to drown my car, visited Romania and spent some time kayaking on the lake.
I also started investing in P2P lending very successfully with the money from the Sicily sale and launched MoneyWorkx to tell others all about it – nobody seemed that interested so I stopped trying to help and just focused on moving my investments to ethical projects… so far this is going well and I’m averaging around 15% APR on my funds…better than the high street.
So all in all 2019 was a productive year. We had three things on our To Do List – move into the kitchen, concrete the garage floor and fix and build new boundary fencing – we achieved all three.
However, in March I lost my Dad. This was a horrible curve ball in an otherwise happy year. I know he loved reading my blog and even at 83 followed me daily on Instagram, it was one of the reasons I kept writing and one of the reasons I’ll keep writing about our adventures going forward.
I’m not making any promises but I will try harder. My first job will be to document properly the kitchen reno, for my own benefit and also for any of you that are interested in the work that went into it.
In the meantime we are transitioning into winter here and our first frost is due tonight so Dan is anti-freezing the cars and I’m sat with my back against a warm radiator steeling myself to get out and plant my new fruit bushes before the ground is too hard to dig. As it has been raining (icy rain) a little, the garden is like a mud bog and I will go out 5’7″ and come back in 6’3″ as it accumulates on the bottom of my boots – there is something about Bulgarian mud that sticks to everything like shit to a blanket.
For 2020 we again have 3 things on our To Do List – put up the garage walls, create a garden space we can use, renovate the dreaded box room into a spare room/craft room and new office …this has been a long time coming!
Anyone have any great garden ideas they want to share, somewhere where the dogs can be free but the plants safe… I’m open to any funky ideas. With the new fences we have doubled our garden space, but it is of course covered in nasty creepers and is about as level as Dolly Parton’s chest… I think I might break Pinterest 🙂
Until soon…. hopefully
J & D and dogs (K, S, C & B)
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