Highs and lows

• Garden: Re-made the garden pathway at the very back. I managed to keep my plants mostly alive in the driest UK summer in years 🪏
• Trips: Tom’s parents turned 70. We did one trip with them to Sicily – I now know the difference between IGP and DOP olive oils – and another May jaunt to Devon 🌴
• House: Renovated the kitchen and bathroom. This took almost a year from starting to find architects and planning to builders being done. It took the whole summer to build, and most of our time, money and energy this year 🛠️
• Yarn creations: sheep toy, tiger toy, stripey blanket… I didn’t really make or record what I made much this year 🐑
• Drawing: on and off this year and I’ve mostly gone to life drawing when I can. I’ll snap and post some sketches soon 👩‍🎨
• Job: lots of change in 2025 and it’s felt very intense at points. I have learnt a lot about co-managing a team, which has been both rewarding and not without challenges. More of my job’s focus was content operations towards the later half of the year, rather than hands on content design; sometimes you to do what needs doing, rather than what you’d choose to do. I also made some headway with my climate literacy pledge to get climate impact into the website strategy. So lots of small positive steps along with the burnout I’ve been feeling 🤷🏽‍♀️
• Social: 3 weddings this year! I saw my Bristol group briefly at one, which was nice. The other two were very different but both fun. I’ve also met up with a close friend at least once a month, often more, and started calling a few people more regularly. I am missing some friends, especially those that live far away. We had some health stuff going on for relatives on Tom’s side, which has been difficult. But given how full on some other domains were this year, my relationships have generally felt like a warm hug 🥰

35 books read

See reading log for more years.

Snapshots

See posts in 2025

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Quotes (emphasis mine):

The Coffee Beans Procedure is a way of doing what psychologists call unpacking. Our imaginations are inherently limited; they can’t include all details at once… Unpacking is a way of re-inflating all the little particulars that had to be flattened so your imagination could produce a quick preview of the future, like turning a napkin sketch into a blueprint. … When people have a hard time figuring out what to do with their lives, it’s often because they haven’t unpacked.

In my experience, whenever you unpack somebody, you inevitably discover something extremely weird about them. Sometimes you don’t have to dig that far, like when your friend tells you that she likes “found” photographs—the abandoned snapshots that turn up at yard sales and charity shops—and then adds that she has collected 20,000 of them. But sometimes the craziness is buried deep, often because people don’t think it’s crazy at all, like when a friend I knew for years casually disclosed that she had dumped all of her previous boyfriends because they had been insufficiently “menacing”.

This is why people get so brain-constipated when they try to choose a career, and why they often pick the wrong one: they don’t understand the craziness that they have to offer, nor the craziness that will be demanded of them, and so they spend their lives jamming their square-peg selves into round-hole jobs.

But you’re not just unpacking the job; you’re also unpacking yourself. Do any aspects of this job resemble things you’ve done before, and did you like doing those things? Not “Did you like being known as a person who does those things?” or “Do you like having done those things?” but when you were actually doing them, did you want to stop, or did you want to continue? These questions sound so stupid that it’s no wonder no one asks them, and yet, somehow, the answers often surprise us.

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“In both magic practice and creative practice, one becomes a bridge between the realms of the immaterial/invisible and the material/visible. In both you are conjuring force into form, and collaborating with something beyond the small self… You are infusing your actions with energy, enchantment and an intention to be a conduit for a current that can change others – and change you.”

Pam Grossman, Austin Kleon’s typewriter interview

This isn’t a new idea of course. Some other books that link spirituality/magic and creative expression:

• Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

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Here’s my log of what happened this season.

Home and garden 🌷

• Moved out of our house temporarily and in with Tom’s family. Nobody fell out, I am pleased to report! And we all may now have a story or two about one another to share at parties forever more.
• We survived major building works on our house. Our builders were fantastic. We had only a few delays because of deliveries. The most challenging of which was moving home with only a toilet and outdoor tap. Thank goodness it was still warm then! We had a couple of small hiccups with miscommunication. So I learned it’s very important to tell people what you want, as they’re about to do it. And/or give very specific written instructions, diagrams etc.
• Let the garden be. This was probably one of the driest years to not be living at home and able to tend to my garden. But, after a few solid downpours in September, it’s all recovering nicely. I’ll probably pick up my focus on this space properly next year, as we’re in winding down mode now.

Work and learning 🦋

• Launched some big projects at work, including some new pages to help people find content more easily. Design work on new projects has been slow if I’m being honest with myself. Juggling intense hands-on work and increasing management responsibilities takes next-level organisation. We’re also in transition as a team, defining new processes and ways of working. I’m hopeful, yet it’s always challenging to navigate through uncertainty. Research on climate impact and digital has been on the backburner.
• In my off time, most of my brain space went to interior design research and thinking about how I want our home to look, feel and function. That has meant a lot of time on social media and magazine websites alas, which I’m now going to have to ween myself off from to save my eyeballs.
• Book reading: basically all in on the cosy crime this summer. I read nothing in June because I felt too overwhelmed to concentrate. But went through a whole series of audiobooks by M.R.C Kasasian in July. A couple of books in August, but living in a building site didn’t make me want to do much of anything. Picked it up again with a couple of books in September too.

Life and creativity ✨

• Went to two very different weddings. One couple had a camping wedding weekend in the Sussex countryside, which was really lovely, relaxed and fun. The other couple had a big indian wedding, which was showstopping, beautiful and also lots of fun.
• Went to my longest friend Mary’s baby shower and saw her welcome her son into the world. Made him a little snow tiger toy, some socks and a hat. Tom’s niece also got welcomed into the world and she got the little sheep I made.
• Felt a bit heavy in my spirit this season with all the stresses. But I did go on several nice walks, including a couple in the Chilterns. It’s nice to find spots not too far away by car.

Next season ⚡️

Autumn is a winding down season, so I’m mainly trying to wrap things up at the moment.

Looking forward to nestling in at home and still focused on house stuff, just with furnishing the new spaces now. I’m hoping my tomatoes to ripen before the frosts come, and also starting to think about garden changes I’d like to make next year.

I’m also trying to get back into a rhythm with walking and exercise, after this summer of no routines.

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Some handy links colleagues have shared recently. Because digital accessibility is confusing when you first start out, and official WCAG can be a bit complex for the less technical.

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It was a from a kit gifted to me, so no details on yarn and so on. I’d guess it’s very likely acrylic with a polyfill stuffing.

The kit had one of the worst patterns I’ve used in a long time though – so confusing! A lot of not telling you how many rows to knit for, then suddenly having “on the 41st row..” type thing. You really did need to read ahead and read it all before you started. Anyway, we got there in the end.

Here’s some more pics:

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