After a little blogging festive break, we are back with a vengeance, and tearing into 2023. This week we look at our first week of early retirement in 2023 and something that simply fried my brain earlier in the week.
A little laid back holiday
Although we had not planned it, regular readers will realise that we took a little blog sabbatical over the last couple of weeks. This was not by design, we just found ourselves having such a wonderful time that we didn’t get round to hitting our regular blog publishing timeline. I did actually have a Christmas weekly blog ready to publish, but it didn’t really hit the mark for the festive season as I found the Christmas period quite hard to process without Dad and Mark so the blog was a little dark. It was great therapy to write, but it will stay in the archive as a purely personal reflection of that time of year.
So welcome back- happy New Year to you all and normal service on the blog now resumes…
An epic New Years eve…
In comparison to many others, we have very tame NYE’s and 2022 was no exception. As we get older and wiser(!?!), we become more at ease with what we like and better at resisting the pressures that society puts onto us to conform. Hence, our NYE consisted of:
a morning design meeting with a Wicks kitchen designer (who schedules that on NYE?), followed by…
a relaxed pint in another pub in our new home town
time in front of our own open fire in our own dilapidated (pre-renovation) home
drinking lots of nice wine
an amazing home cooked steak dinner (on a one burner camping gas stove)
an early night watching TV in bed (as it is the only place that is warm without a fire)
seeing in the new year at midnight (just!)
and promptly falling asleep thereafter.
A busy week
It has been a pretty hectic week to start 2023- and we only have ourselves to blame!
We had a planning meeting with our builder prior to the knock though happening at the end of January. By the end of the meeting, timelines had been condensed and we had agreed to work starting a week earlier than planned. Not too bad, until you consider that the builders are moving in the day after we return from skiing in France! So at the start of this week, we found ourselves having only 2 days to rip out the kitchen, strip walls for the insulating work, set up a kitchen upstairs, move all our possessions from down stairs to up stairs and pack for a 2 week+ trip to the Alps!
During this 2 day window, we also had to finalise plans for the kitchen, as after visiting Wicks on NYE we now have a concrete plan (and price!) for our new kitchen- we just need someone to fit it!
The long drive to the Alps
After a crazy couple of days getting the house prepared for the builders, we were ready to set off on the long drive to France, but not before a 0930 appointment with the kitchen designer and a fish and chip lunch with Mum. We got going about 2 o’clock and had a good run down to Dover. This is always the hardest part of the journey as driving in Europe is an absolute dream. Anyway, the motorways were kind to us and we settled in for the night at a beautiful little park-up behind the police station in Dover. Dover is so lovely at this time of year (!?!?) and Jackie commented how how privileged she felt to be staying in such a place!
We had made the decision to get a more relaxed morning crossing than our usual 0500 affair! The extra couple of hours sleep made a real difference to the driving that day, and we made great progress across France. We made it down to Bourge en Bresse just before the supermarkets shut, and treated ourselves to racclette and beer at the amazing campervan Aire right next to the historic and impressive Abbey.
Having broken the back of the journey, we luxuriated in a lazy day pootling around one of our favourite alpine towns of Annecy, having a picnic lunch on the shores of the lake and then finding the most exquisite park up for the night just outside Albertville.
Saturday morning saw us complete two epic food shops for the week, one in Lidl for all the essentials and one in a more upmarket supermarket where we attracted the attention of the security guard for most of our visit as we were clearly looking to purchase too much and looking surprisingly shifty. If I could only speak French, I would have invited him to help pack our bags!
Headspace milestone
Just a little milestone, but one that is important to me, is that I hit 10000 minutes of daily meditation logged on my Headspace App this week. I am not a massive one for logging performance stats for this, but it does reflect a lot of hard work and commitment over the last 18 months. I meditate every morning and it brings me great comfort. I find it incredibly difficult at times and it can be rather frustrating when my mind constantly wanders, but that is part of the process. I am getting better at it, but I have a long way to go. If you have never thought about giving it ago, I would thoroughly recommend it to build into your daily schedule. It has done wonders for my mental health and wellbeing and it keeps me grounded in these ever changing times.
The Cosmic Calendar
Those people that know me will know that I love a bit of self development and philosophy. As a consequence of this, I subscribe to a number of email lists that provide me with weekly thinking points and information that I may want to pursuit further. I love this stuff, but one particular thing this week really friend my brain and I would love to share it with you.
The idea comes from Michael Easter’s great book The Comfort Crisis. It’s from a chapter called 12/31, 11:59:33 P.M.
“The host was explaining the concept called the cosmic calendar. It puts all of time—the Universe’s 13.8 billion years—on a yearlong scale. So, in the cosmic calendar, the Big Bang occurred on January 1 at 12:00:00 a.m. The Milky Way galaxy formed on March 16. Our solar system took shape on September 2, and Earth followed on September 6, about 4.4 billion years ago. The first complex cells on Earth emerged on November 9. Dinosaurs appeared on Christmas and went extinct on December 30. And then the host said that in this calendar, all of recorded human history—12,000 years and 480 generations of people—shows up on the night of December 31 at about 11:59 and 33 seconds.”
Wow! That certainly puts our little life into context! At this time of year that we tend to sit down the year gone, and look forward to the year ahead with all the best intentions, we perhaps need to consider our place in the grand scheme of the universe. We are a beyond December 31 at 11:59.33 and time is ticking. We should have no time for regrets of the past or spend too much time day dreaming of the future. Our life is now and we need to start living our best live right in this moment, as we are just a speck of dust in the grand scheme of the cosmic calendar!
So that is it for another week. We are just glad that we are back onto our normal schedule of publishing the blog. As I write, we have just had the most amazing family day in the snow on the slopes of France. More of that next week.
Have an amazing week,
Richard and Jackie
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