In the three weeks I was away, the cold dark valley I call home exploded into warmth and light and greenery and colour, and it could NOT be more welcome. I assumed it had happened gradually over that period but Alex assured me it actually happened pretty much suddenly in one day even for everyone who was here at the time.
I was incredibly lucky not to really suffer from any jet lag coming back this way. I didn’t sleep at all on the plane on the way home which meant I stayed awake for 24 hours in a way that meant I felt like death precisely when I arrived home, but actually may have been a good move overall. After a really good night’s sleep post Eurovision I was pretty much right as rain. Still, its disconcerting being home after a long time away, and it was so lovely to have some visitors to distract me from all my busy thoughts and distracted brain looking back across the Atlantic, and ground me back here. Always so lovely to catch up with Hazel and Lily! (Proof, though surely it's not needed in this day and age, that making friends on the internet is fun and good)
As well as greenery, so much blossom, and also FINALLY able to wear nice clothes and not then immediately have to cover them up with a massive frumpy fleecy cardigan and three coats like I have been for the last SIX MONTHS. I know I moan a lot about the weather here, so please know that I am appreciating all this warmth and not-rain SO MUCH. I do not take it for granted for a moment.
Three weeks away as a freelancer means a lot of playing catch-up on return. I am so lucky that I have a steady stream of work (pls don’t stop!) and I do now feel like I’m just about back on top of things, but it was a busy while back there.
While I was away we got the keys to our new house (WHAT), this is the house three doors down that my parents bought and which we will commence renting from them come August when we have to be out of our current place. This is amazing because it means we’ve got about three months to 1) spend an obscene amount of money doing the loft conversion and 2) generally spruce up the rest of the place. I so want to be in there sprucing but I HAVE NO TIME AGH
(Also this is a terrible day of visual diary quality-wise but feel captures some of the manic state)
(Also it would really help if I didn't have like 5 personal projects on the go that I'm super excited about working on alongside everything else OH WELL)
This is also a terrible drawing but hey guess what I didn’t have time to do a better one because I was hoovering up nearly a month’s worth of accumulated Charlie hair (which I swear amounts to nearly an entire Charlie).
Okay, so key things to note here: 1) I am FINE, 2) I am not going to run away. But I do have moments of feeling like maybe I'm *not* fine and maybe I *do* want to run away. My trip to America was a gentle testing of these feelings, but has generally proved inconclusive. I was happy to come home, back to Hebden Bridge. I'm excited about our new house and our lives here, and there is much to love. But I fell for LA more than even I had expected to, and when things are hard it's difficult not to daydream about just dropping everything and running.
(Also, I absolutely love Meredith Park's work, she makes the most beautiful autobiographical comics about FEELINGS and metaphors for feelings. Her work is a huge inspiration to me in terms of trying to think of less literal visual ways to express thoughts and emotions, although I have a long way to go to even get close to how evocative and moving her work is.)
But anyway. Sometimes I'm not very good at delegating, or asking for help... And sometimes there's no one to delegate to, or ask for help from. I did manage it though, and it made a huge difference, having help with Charlie and not cooking dinner for just one day freed me up to... well, do loads of other things I'd needed to do, but also just to just have a much-needed quiet sit down.
Loads of my drawings this month have been bad because I've been busy and distracted by other projects so I decided to try really hard at drawing some good flowers to give myself a break. That was nice.
We had a much needed HOUSE MEETING, as Justin was away in Finland for a week, then I was in the US for three weeks, overlapping with Justin being away in Madeira, followed by Alex being away on a couple of work trips, meaning the three of us had barely been in the same room for like 5 or 6 weeks. This is a direct copy of the actual 'agenda' which we drew up. House meetings are a good idea. We're all going to be better at everything. I hope. We didn't manage to agree on paint colours for the new house though...
At the weekend we went over to Wickes and continued to completely fail at agreeing on paint colours. I want all walls throughout the house painted white — the logic being (well, aside from the fact that this is what I've always wanted anyway), we live in a dark valley so light and bright is best, and we've got so much mismatched over-colourful stuff, any more colour would just be terrible. I had assumed this would be non-contentious, but... apparently not.
To cheer us up after our bickerings, our lovely friend Harriet and her mum came to hang out and we ate loads of cake.
For my longtime BFF Naomi's 30th birthday, her sister arranged a surprise visit to see some cool birds of prey. I was like 'whatever sure, I'll come to make Naomi happy' and then on the day got MASSIVELY HYPE for all the birds. (You can see pictures of me getting massively hype here)
A weekend of loads of cake and lovely visitors and birds of prey and DIY left me both really tired and with loads of things to catch up on. But I managed to restrain my natural urges to maximise the productivity of every possible moment of my day by letting myself just… relax. A bit. WEIRD.
Finally got to a long awaited screenprinting project, making some RAINY TEA TOWELS (which you can look at in more detail/buy here). I've had this idea for a while, and I made a zine about it earlier this year. Funnily enough it's summer now and the rain has stopped so I'm thinking about it less, but as you know if you read this blog regularly, it is FREQUENTLY ON MY MIND during Hebden Bridge's 9-month rainy season, so maybe this got it out of my system a little. Maybe.
So... Sorry if this month I've sounded like a bit of a broken record. BUSY BUSY BUSY I keep saying. I guess it's important to note that this is not a complaint. I am so incredibly lucky to have so many exciting projects on the go, so lucky to work with (or just hang out with and be inspired by) loads of incredible people across so many different areas, so lucky to be able to pay the rent (and take myself on ridiculous adventures) by doing what I love and have always dreamt of doing. I have been able to realise that dream even more in the last year or so, since moving to Hebden Bridge, than ever before... And I am at my happiest when I am busy. If I wasn't busy I would be making myself busy. I am not good at down time.
But I am conscious that just at the moment my busyness is meaning that some things I have always prided myself on are sliding. I am not getting enough sleep. There are not enough hours in the day to accomplish everything I want/need to. I stay up late scribbling at personal projects, wake up early to walk Charlie and spend the rest of my days just trying to squeeze in all of my responsibilities in terms of paid work, cooking, cleaning and other domestic tasks, even more Charlie walking, and maintaining some small semblance of a social life (oh, and trying to DIY like a whole new house into niceness which is completely falling by the wayside, agh!). I am not cooking well. I don't have the time or headspace to shop well or plan meals, which is what I need to do in order to make good food for myself. Both of these things I am very aware of, and both of them I am hoping to be able to make a conscious effort to address, and get back on track with.
But anyway, I'm still running, somehow, despite still bloody hating it. (Alex says they're impressed that I persist given how much I loathe it). It's horrible, but for the first time in my life I'm happy with my figure, and it's a more time-efficient way of exercising Charlie, so I do persist, despite its awfulness. I'm starting to work a little on hills, which I've generally avoided, at least as best you can when living in such a ridiculously hilly place. But I powered through and ran all the way up to Heptonstall today (grindingly slowly), which if you know that hill you will hopefully appreciate is a reasonably impressive feat.
And so, onwards into June. Promise of so much goodness. I am incredibly lucky in so many ways at the moment... I hope I can get all my balances right. Work/life. Sleep/wake. Stop/go. And so on.
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