April 2022

 I think that April passed by even more quickly than February did. Either that or March just seemed incredibly long and never-ending and April was such a whirlwind of events that I suddenly woke up and it was over.

I had all these plans for April. I mean, we all know that I had all these plans for April. I was going to write  1,000 words every day and I was going to be well on my way to completing a new rough draft of the vampire novel I've been unable to not think about since I tucked it away in the proverbial drawer.

I'm really good at making plans and, while doing so, forgetting that Life likes to fuck with me and will inevitably drop a hurricane (or two) into my carefully laid-out intentions.

❎ CampNaNoWriMo April 2022

CampNaNoWriMo in April 2022 was not the exception.

I wrote a whopping 613 words in the first day.

Then I spent the rest of the first week opening up the document and blinking at it in confusion. I thought that maybe what I needed was to write it by hand instead of the pressure that comes from the computer screen and that deeply-ingrained sense that the computer is for the good copy. But when I picked up the pen, I just did not want to write it out again. Not when it's so much better as it plays out in my head.

I ended March wanting nothing more than to write this novel.

I spent a week of April wondering why the hell I was insisting on beating this dead horse. What was I getting out of it, other than a terminal case of imposter syndrome? Am I forever doomed into this cycle of thinking I can "fix" this story by making it completely different from what I had originally intended it to be?

It quickly became a thing that I just didn't make the time for any more. Did that mean that I wasn't writing? No. I actually did quite a bit of writing. Just nothing in regard to this project. And I think that's a sign that I should put it aside... Permanently.

❎ The To-Be-Read Pile

 Another oops. I've been reading a lot of fanfiction and I have a lot of theories on why that is, but nothing that's particularly helpful.

However, April also happens to be my birth month and, if there's one thing that's almost guaranteed, it's that someone will give me a gift card with which to buy books.

So I ordered more books.

Yes, this means that the TBR pile is getting bigger before it shrinks. However, I'm in the mood for some romance and HEA and nothing on the pile really meets that mark. Not exclusively, anyway. I figure that once the romance novels get me back into the groove of reading, I'll be more likely to tackle the books I've acquired in the last year (or so) that seemed so interesting at the time.

Have I mentioned that I'm a mood-reader?

✅ Be Social (sort of)

The moms of the kids in my third grader's grade at school are pretty great women and they invited me out to join them in a Paint Night at one of their houses the other week. My husband, super great guy that he is, told me that I should go before I even completed the thought about whether I wanted to or not. He knows me too well. It's become very easy to make excuses and not go.

It has been so long since I have participated in any sort of social event, though the last time that I did that didn't include family, was also with the same group of women. Part of it is, obviously, the pandemic. The other part is that I just haven't had the time. I have been up to my eyeballs in mothering 4 kids (and all that entails), keeping my partnership with my husband steady, general adulting, working, and, additionally in the last five years, taking classes to obtain my Bachelor's degree. I've been too busy to breathe, let alone do anything I once enjoyed... hence the #allthethingsididnthavetimetodolist project for 2022.

Making friends and making time to be a friend just didn't rate high enough on the list.

But I went and I had a really good time and I painted this sign, which is now hanging up in the kids' bathroom.

We're already talking about another night out. And I'm entertaining the idea of hosting later this summer, when we're all going absolutely batty from having our kids home all day and shuffling them to and from camps just so we can have some form of childcare while we work. 

✅ Cleaning up the Garden

My biggest success for April is the garden at the front of my house. Last summer, my husband began the rather sizeable project of rebuilding the front porch, replacing the rotted railing, and repainting the house. Taking on the disaster of the garden was on my #allthethingsididnthavetimetodolist with the general idea that it would happen this spring.

This is what it looked like in February:

And these are the plants I bought for my birthday:

  

This is what I did with some of the plants: 

And this is what the garden looks like right now:

You can't really see in this photograph, but the rhododendron and rose bush are still there. 

The weeds are all gone though. That took a day and a half to dig up and clear out.

I also have to plan another trip to the nursery because I hadn't started on the clearing out and cleaning up part before I went shopping for plants. There's quite a bit more that I still want to do and that I'm able to do since I found some plant pots hiding in our shed. My goal is to have the front of the house looking really good for the summer when everyone is out and about walking around in the neighbourhood. Surprisingly, it was easy to find plants that require full sun and most of what I've bought so far are perennials. Our house faces south, so we have sun on the porch from about 10am to 5pm most days between April and September. In past years, the annuals that I've put in containers and in the garden bed haven't survived very well. I'm hoping to have better luck with the perennials.

I'm also hoping to find a good deal on stone because the edging that the previous home owners put in (or maybe the builders did it) is very... bland. It's also not doing a great job of keeping the heather from attempting to migrate into the lawn.

I'm finding that there's a mindlessness to gardening that is soothing. It's a time where I can just focus on the simple task of digging, pulling out weeds, putting in plants that will grow and bloom, and there's very little demand on my brain to operate on multiple high-levels in a short amount of time.

Also, brightly coloured flowers make me happy and it's fun to pick out a plant because I like the look of it and it seems to go well with this other plant that I like the look of. I'll definitely be putting together some more containers.

And then I'm going to move on to the flower garden in the back yard, which is going to be a job and a half all on its own & actually carries a lot of baggage, considering it's a garden.

This is just the tip of the iceberg that was April. I'm another year older, a little wiser, and definitely resentful of a lot of things but also grateful for an equal number of significantly more important things, which is all that matters.

Really planning on doing some actual reading in May though...

Take care. Remember to let yourself breathe.