Woody Wonders

... especially when you're moving house! This is not going to be the longest of blogs this week because to be honest, I'm exhausted.  It's been one hell of a week.  Remember in last week's blog when I said I might be rocking in the corner after moving house?  Well, let's put it this way, on numerous occasions this week, if I'd actually had the energy to cry then I would have. This was after we'd moved a sh*t ton of boxes and still have nowhere to sit!! We always knew deep down that the worst case scenario might actually happen and it very much did.  Due to all the delays thanks to Covid and lockdown, our plans with the house were way behind.  Despite moving last Wednesday, we didn't have a working kitchen until Friday evening.  Alright, not too bad, I hear you say, that's just a couple of nights having a takeaway.  Nope, due to the fact that the kitchen fitter needed workspace, the removals guys literally had to pile all our stuff into one end of the...

Have you reached your 'FI Point' yet? It's been a funny old week, I feel very much in limbo land at the moment.  We're due to move house in two days so there's been lots of to-ing and fro-ing recently and I don't feel like I belong anywhere at the minute. Change, as we know, is stressful.  It often involves a step into the unknown.  Sometimes it's forced upon us due to things out of our control and at other times, we instigate it ourselves.  Any kind of change is stressful, even positive change.  We made the decision to buy the house, we know the area and, best of all, it's still close to my running trails, I literally have to walk round the corner to the footpath.  It's all positive so why are we stressed about it. Well, for a start, there was lockdown to contend with.  We'd arranged for several major things to be carried out on the house before we moved in - digging up the garden, fitting a new kitchen and having an orangery built.  These shoul...

Forget about willpower and discipline,  it's time to flip your thinking People often to say to me that I have lots of willpower and discipline, and I suppose on the surface it does look like that.  I'm quite happy to get up at 6 am and go for a run and then I'll still find the time and energy to do some exercise in the evening, as well as a whole host of things in-between. To be perfectly honest though, it's nothing to do with willpower, it's all down to creating habits and routine.  I do these things as naturally as brushing my teeth every morning and evening, I don't have to think about them. As many of you will know by now, over the last few months I've been experimenting with new routines and habits.  There's a few tweaks here and there I'd like to make and I'm struggling in some areas and finding it difficult to build new habits.  Your mind will always take the easy option and your thoughts will always go down the path of least resistance, w...

The secret diary of Woody ... aged 50 years and 1 month I've been doing a bit of an experiment over the last week.  I've reverted back to being 14 years old and have been keeping a diary in a bid to find out what I REALLY do with my time and how I feel about things.  I suppose these days the buzz word to use is 'journaling', in fact it seems to be a bit of thing right now to write down your inner thoughts and feelings to discover your true 'authentic' self. Before you get too excited and settle down with your coffee thinking 'whoa, I wonder what juicy titbits she's going to reveal', it's all rather boring in comparison to my teenage one where "life wasn't fair", "my mum and dad never let me do anything" and "my plan as to how I was going to marry Simon le Bon".  Shout out to any fellow Duranies.  Hey, did you know that the word 'Duranie' is actually in the Urban Dictionary with a definition of "The n...