The Cat @ Moonlight...

I found last week exhausting.

Returning to a (part-) week at two places of work after so long languishing on the sofa over the holidays, gently grazing over the remnants in the kitchen at will...

I am still finding it hard to get back into certain routines and to 'return to normal' - Hah! Whatever that is?

What does my 'routine' consist of these days, post-Empty Nest?

1. Monday and Friday - Working in my 'proper' job, still within the heart of government. My office is going to close at the end of March, so there's not long to go with that part of my routine;

2. Tuesday to Thursday - Working at my charity voluntary placement which my office is sponsoring, to enable some of us to have some recent work-experience to put on our CVs!

I love it at my placement, where they do wonderful things for and with young people. I'm helping them to gear up for some strategic stuff - I didn't know I would love it before I got there, as I trembled on the doorstep before gingerly pressing the buzzer to go up the steep Victorian stairs, but I'm really hoping that my work will lead to something more permanent for me post-March... Fingers crossed! I'm putting these words out into the Universe now, to this avail. Wish me luck, black cat!

3. Tuesday evening - My Psychotherapy coursework commences - This is going well, although it's still very new and a bit scary, to be honest... There's loads to read and absorb and I'm trying to get to grips with the difference between the practical requirements, the academic expectations, and how much self-reflection is needed... Such a balance to meet...

4. Wednesday evening - Now Group Therapy has begun - Once again, I'm not really certain what to expect, however, it is an essential part of the training programme, to take part in therapy yourself. I'm not sure how much I shall be able to share here... We'll see.

5. By Friday, I'm now feeling a little like the Cat at Midnight, as in this enchanting picture above... My head buzzing from the rigours of the week, I feel like strolling the streets in search of excitement and interest, eager for the weekend, where I squeeze in chores and necessary shopping, an outing to a Farmer's Market or 'antiquing' in slightly better weather than we've got at the moment - What a laugh that is - The reality being that some Sundays I visit something that looks like a motorway cafe for Sunday Lunch with my close family, with a week's worth of vegetables on my groaning plate, then stagger next door to what looks like half an aircraft hangar, corrugated and nightmarishly cold, filled to the rafters with furniture and treasures culled from country homes and house clearances, at home and in France, policed by lovely octogenarian ladies in floor-length vintage fur coats and granny-knits.

How they move any of the heavy furniture around, I'll never know. I suspect they have an army of ancient male help-meets, drilled into service and catering to their every whim.

I wish I did!

I need to build in some time to my routine for more exercise, as previously hinted. There's still time. I found myself toying with trotting in to a Wool Shop this weekend - Anxious as I am to try a return to crochet, heavily inspired by Mrs Jones Home Thoughts From Home and her fabulous achievements - CLICK HERE - Maybe I'm being too ambitious with plans for my routine!

Routine turns out to be essential to the human condition. Some of the practice around Psychotherapy is based in routine - Weekly meetings, therapeutic contracting, games and strokes. Did you know that, mes braves?

I am asking you to consider what your own routine consists of - Which of it is essential, and which is habit that perhaps doesn't do our souls any good really.

Not nagging, just curious. Honestly!

The Blog as Muse...

Sshhh! I've only got a few moments. GJ is in the bath and I can hear him about to let the water out. He manages to make sounds just as if a runaway hippo has landed in the midst of my bathroom for a surreptitious wallow... I love that word, 'surreptitious' - I haven't used it in ages. Note to self...

Is it still the Christmas holidays? Is there life at all out there in the world? Is there a future after eating more at Christmas than said runaway hippo could consume? Have I missed the sales?

I am wallowing at home, I must admit. Grizzler is also home from College and takes up more space than a herd of giraffe. That's when he's awake. Which doesn't appear to be that often. When he is, he wanders through the living room languidly, nibbling leaves off the top of trees, and only yesterday I saw him stoop to take his wallet from the top of what I like to call my Belgian bureau. I need a step-ladder to reach the top of it. He merely looks down upon its form, and secretes things up there he doesn't want us short folk to find.

The large cream leather sofa that we bought as a family seven years ago is proving otherwise - And we have all out-grown it. Grizz slumps to his full length at one end, tippy-tappying away, communicating with other teen alien life-forms, including his sweet girlfriend - I sit at the other end, laptop on the arm of the chaise longue bit, legs tucked beneath me, reading blogs and ancestor hunting. ...GJ now has to sit on the floor. The only part of him that is able to attain the sofa when we are both ensconced, Grizz and I, is his elbow. His face looks a bit like Queen Victoria's did when she was wont to say, "We are not amused!"

My husband complains profusely at our irritating tippy-tappy getting in the way of his watching endless re-runs on the Discovery and History channels. Hence not blogging in ages...

Thank you for all of your good wishes. I wish you well and hope that all your plans for New Year are splendiferous.

Weather has been particularly crap here. Lots of snowfall, treacherous roads. So, we were reduced to only going out hunter-gatherer style, for weeks. Today, low mist lies in this part of the Coquet Valley like snow-white candy floss. It's beautiful. There has been a bit of a melt and the roads are beginning to re-appear from their icy tombs. ...I hope for an outing. The skies are white-pink and blue.

I would like to buy some inserts for the new Botanic Filofax I treated myself to for my Christmas stocking...

Yes, of course I treated myself. If I didn't, who would?

As it was, the actual diary part dated from 2008, so not even last year, hence its bargain price ticket! Filofax describes it as "young, funky and utterly now" - Very me then!

I have two Filofaxes - I was feeling a little bad about that, the avarice of it, as it were, until I just read THIS at the English Muse's blog HERE. I found her bloglette while looking for some suitable photos on Google.

I shall return thence for more reading, when I am banned from the tippy-tappy very shortly. I heard the hippo moving about upstairs earlier. Only a few short mo's until I hear his tender trotters traverse the stairs...

Anyhoo, this blogger, a journalist for the LA Times, has seven, and uses one purely for Inspiration - I love the idea of that - Living inside your mind and exploiting your creative urges so. I might use my electric pink pleather Filofax that GJ gave me several years ago, just for that.

Then again, using one as an address book, also seems an interesting option. Particularly when my horizons are starting to expand with the threat of beginning my voluntary Psychotherapeutic Counselling placement, perhaps in a doctors' practice, (as soon as I can find anyone gullible enough to take me on), at some point in the New Year. I'll need to be muchly organised then...

My goddess, how I have rambled today.

You see, without the regular discipline of being a Bloggerista, just how quickly do I return to being a Rambler Without A Cause...

So, to end, because it's about time to let you get on with far more important things - Here, I have been and no further, relaxing at home, slobbing about, scarcely even combing the wrinkles out of my hair some days, and I really feel as if I would like to be some place I would find even more relaxing...

Like here. Well, wouldn't you? ~ Ciao, mes amis - Mwah!

Psychotherapy Today...

I'm also over HERE today, mes bloggy chums! If you're interested in my Grizz-y adventures, that is.

I was really only kidding the other day, when I wondered if I'd offended our American correspondents. I know I more than likely haven't but it made for an interesting post. Hope you don't mind...

Today I am soooooooooooo not here.

I am cramming for the first of my Psychotherapy assignments. Yes, cramming.

Work I should have done earlier, I know. I know...

When will I learn my lesson? When, I ask you?!

You might not know that I touch-type. I was taught to type years ago on manual typewriters by a mad and wonderful Joyce Grenfell-esque evening class tutor in Towcester, Northamptonshire...

And now, I'm going to have to learn how to touch-type the word 'Psychotherapy' correctly, because it's one of those words I can almost never get right.

For almost never... Read NEVER.

I am going to have to learn it, FGS, if I am training in Psychotherapy, and am interested in becoming a Psychotherapeutic Counsellor as a career.

Yes indeed!

Psychtrapy, psychotheropy, psuchotherapy, pshcyhtheridp...

And again with the elegant multi-fabric'ed chaise-longue, because I think it is so beautiful.

And, at the same time, the picture of the studio above is probably closer to how I intend to work.

If I am ever lucky enough to work.

If I pass this blinking assignment!