Blimey a month passes quickly when the sun is out and the garden is growing and you start a new business up.
So this month I have mainly been…
Launching my new business and it has been a huge success. I wanted to work 16 hours or so a week and I started the month with no clients, my contract on my previous job as Funding Office for a charity had ended and I had been fiddling with the idea of F.G.C. but decided to go for it, with the only alternative being unemployment as there simply is no part time fixed days and hours work here.
I have ended up after 30 days trading now fully booked of regular clients with a gap if I want to squash in the odd one off spring cleans. After the first 10 days I was 3/4 of the way there and pretty overwhelmed by the success of it as I. It really feels like the first thing I have done that has really worked, my vision & strategy were right (not that they were ever written down as either of those!)
And I am enjoying the work, loving helping people to feel happy again in their homes and in control of them. I have also developed an unhealthy obsession over cleaning taps back to mirror shiny.
One thing I hadn’t really thought through though was the physical side of the work, doing a 5 hour spring clean means moving for 5 hours, hoovering, scrubbing, up and down and my body has not been used to doing that 3 or 4 days a week. I ache now, my back is sore BUT my upper arms are getting smaller each week – so massive silver lining.
So hopefully F.G.C will continue to do as well as it is now, I went into it thinking give it a few months to a year and then see what I want to do with my life, maybe a Masters in Social Work, but then again stuck at a desk? Hmm…we will see.
Another venture (or maybe adventure is more appropriate) has been the work along with my friend Charlotte on starting up a new Woodcraft Folk group. We both decided that we wanted to move on from another charity we were volunteering for and tackle a new challenge that we felt passion about. And after reading about the W.C.F. after I saw @helloitsgemma post a link to their site around the time of the March 2011 demonstrations in London.
The sentances from the W.C.F website that jumped out at me were,
“We offer a place where children will grow in confidence, learn about the world and start to understand how to value our planet and each other”
“Our aim is to have great fun, but also to try and develop children’s self-confidence and build their awareness of society around them.”
This is exactly the sort of place I wanted Ben to attend and as there were no groups anywhere near us it seemed the logical thing to set one up. So for the last couple of months we have been working to set up the Southend & Castle Point Woodcraft Folk.
We are starting the Woodchip group up in September and running it as a parent & toddler group, everyone we have spoken to, tweeted or emailed from the W.C.F. have been so helpful and supportive of us we are really excited to get started.
We are holding an awareness and fundraising event in August, which leads me onto the other thing I have been busy with…
The garden – I have lived in this house just over a year and when I moved in both the front and back garden were a mixture of over grown and totally bare, I potted around last year and did grow and plant quite a bit, but it is this year that it has totally bloomed in all ways.
The photo above is the front garden this year, when I moved in that area had a hedge that was 10 foot tall and the part that is planted was as below
I didn’t spend a lot of money as most the plants were reduced as they were nearly dead, the little fence was in the sale, but once planted out it looked like this
And with some tlc, weeding and a lot of luck it now looks like
The back garden has been redesigned from last year, I had dug out a new vegetable patch this year to really go for the grow it yourself. And me being me has to do it right, along with the excel sheet detailing what to do with each thing planted and how long it will take.
I have also done potatoes in a bag and strawberries in the ground and pots, the photo above was taken in May, everything in it is rather bigger now 
I do thrive on being busy, my body isn’t quite as keen today though, back is sore, head thinks it would be clearer with about 3 weeks sleep, but sure isn’t that the same for us all.
I have given up on running for the moment as (start the list of excuses here) well I just have, but I have borrowed a bike and I am taking Ben out on it today if I can fix the borrowed child bike seat on, I am fairly nervous but hoping we don’t finish the day in A & E.
Looking forward to getting back here more regularly once things have settled down, or maybe when it rains just