cleaning out my grandparents mid-century home 🏠 technical set-backs

Happy Winter/Summer (hemisphere depending), Honeybunches!

I hope you're making peace with whatever weather shifts are happening in your neck of the woods. I'm wearing leggings as pajamas, have all the old wool blankets on my bed, am filling the hot water bottle up every morning and have made the cut-throat choice of putting my alarm on the otherside of the room each night - otherwise I am seriously struggling to find any motivation to get out from under the covers come morning! It seems to be working, in that @ 7:15am when I'm stretching away having had some breakfast, I feel like I'm keeping pace with the day.

This time of the year, when the days are so short - is just hard. It doesn't feel like there are enough hours in the day to take care of yourself properly, let alone make progress on work-related tasks. This week was a wrestle with health-related stuff, as well as ever-unfolding tech-issues.

WORK.

I hoped to have Big Mouth mostly formatted this week. I intended to make the switch from PowerPoint (don't laugh hehe) to InDesign to do this (the industry standard) however, downloading it onto my (quite old) tech has prooven near impossible. My brother will help me (from London, bless) tonight to find a way around this - but bloody hell, it's been frustrating.

Ultimately, I need to bite the bullet & upgrade my laptop. It's also illuminated that self-publishing cookbooks to the standard that I am, as a one person band - is a just a really long process. But hopefully the niche-filling, specialness of the finished product will be obvious and you too will feel it's been worth the wait!

The task of going through my grandparents house and getting it ready for sale (they did next to no sorting out before they went into care, thank you so much!) continues everyday. You can easily loose hours getting distracted by the cupboard-fulls of mid-century gems, 70s pottery & impressive patchwork my grandmother did in her hey-day. Nearly every object is associated with a memory from my childhood - as you make up one box for the op-shop, you make three for yourself. The cleaning involved is also so daunting. I'm documenting some of the novel things I find on TikTok, if you're interested.

Here are some of the things I'm keeping (well my brother's dibs-ed the fan).

With a dedicated day of cleaning - I'll be able to save a lot of pans for the Microbakery (which is no small thing, as they are so expensive). I was very choofed to find a heart tin in the back of her cupboard too. Expect a frilly-maximalist heart cake from me soon <3

Having lots of family around (my Dad & Uncle) this week has been really lovely. I'll miss having the extra chatty personalities around, but I also know my productivity will benefit when they leave tomorrow hehe.

Also, I cannot emphasise how much Merlin has mellowed in the last couple of months. His love for cuddling (specifically falling asleep on my lap in the evenings - handy he's a small labrador lol) has gone through the roof. He's 18 months now, and to see his personality continuing to evolve is so special. He also only really 'cuddles' with me so... yeah. *Hair flick*

FOOD.

This has not been a week full of kitchen-accomplishments. I don't think my family has ever had take-away so many nights in a row ah! Spening days cleaning out a house has left no one (including me) with the brains/oomph for making dinner.

Perhaps a hiatus has been the perfect thing though, it's nice to have the itch to cook again.

READ.

I finished listening to this book this week (a solid contributing factor to my general yucky brain-state) and while I appreciate what it does, I just couldn't bring myself to like it at all. It's about a rich, conventionally attractive, white, 20-something gal in the early 2000s, deciding to medicate her way into hibernation for one year, with the help of a hot-pot of sleeping pills, prescribed by the wackiest psychologist you have ever encountered. Not a lot happens apart from a succession of spaced-out days, monologues from her "best-friend" who pops round to her apartment & bizarre psychologist appointments - that is until the very end when there is some early 2000s related meaning-making to tie it all together. Which from the first chapter I sort of saw coming.

I'm glad I read it to see what all the fuss was about, but please don't go there if you're not in the most robust of mental-states. (To me) this felt like absorbing warm-fuzz each time I listened. Glad to be on the otherside!

RECIPE.

These Copy-Cat Healthy Lab Chewy Cookie Dough Balls are coming to you this weekend! I've run out of time to perfect the recipe - with a million errands & a cold coming on. But they only need one more go & they'll be golden <33

Thank you for reading, I wish you a re-centering weekend!

Phoebe & Merlin x