Easing Into The Roaring Twenties

With Christmas now a long, distant memory it’s time I got back into the swing of my ‘factual’ midweek and ‘update’ weekend posts. I might be setting myself up for a fail but I’m also willing to at least try to get back into old habits. Christmas was eventful with Christmas Day being my only total day off of the festive week and I must apologise to my future in laws that I spent a great deal of it snoozing on their sofa. I was absolutely wiped out. The impending new year made me recognise the familiar pattern that I was sensing a loss of control which made me also sense a panic attack looming. I don’t know how I easily recognised this but I’m glad I did.

The first few days of the year I spent being utterly selfish and focusing on myself. I watched the tv I wanted to, I ate well and I exercised. Ultimately this made me feel so much better about myself and I’m glad to say that the stresses that this week had in store for me did not get the better of me like they have previously. I did not even cry once and for me, a professional toilet cubicle crier, that’s a big deal. Tomorrow or next week might be a different story, and it’s totally okay to not be okay too, just sometimes you have to acknowledge triumphs and give yourself a pat on the back.

Ultimately cosy days on the sofa under many layers with a warm beverage in my Wooden Overcoats Antigone mug

In summary, here’s some things that happened to me since the last update and in the first 11 days of January. In my home life we discovered our bathroom had been flooding into our living room just before Christmas and since have been trying to get through an insurance nightmare plus dealing with a period of time where we had to shower at other people’s houses. Since then we’ve been told we can use the bath, which may have something to do with the sudden inspiration for blog posts. I’ve always written the best content while soaking in a bubble bath.

Not a great look for a shower unit

I have now had all my exam results back and I’m pleased to say I passed them all. Now one step closer to being a qualified APT! I’ve been trying to get my portfolio of evidence sorted, pinging out request for witness statements and saving screenshots of documents. It’s not going very smoothly but I’m slowly getting there. My manager also bought me a lovely bottle of gin as a gift to say well done which was an awesome surprise.

❤️ Lovely gift with an apt name considering our bathroom situation!

I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a day in the life of Mortuary Gem but I got as far as taking the below photo of the lift closing on me in the morning. Is this something you would like to see further than the morning lift? I could do a day each month, for example the third Wednesday, and then it would be very different each time!

How my days begin, down to the basement I go

Lastly, my Dad dropped round one day a notebook which belonged to my Grandad who died when I was about 10. It was amazing to read and it arrived on a day when I really needed something like that. There’s scribbles of quotations he found and loved, a couple of photographs and also a great listing of all the music he had borrowed from the library and recorded for his own collection! One thing I also very much enjoyed that, like the majority of the notebooks I have ever used, there was a fabulous start but also a lot of blank pages inside. Good to know it’s in the family to start something in a notebook and not finish it! Of course because you move onto another new notebook and a wonderful idea to pursue.

I’ll leave you with this (plus a translation of his not quite so great handwriting!), a quotation about death he obviously found amusing and/or interesting.

“Life itself is a contradiction, because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death”

MG x