you can't plan on the heart

I have some beautiful ranaculus in my bedroom. I saw my family yesterday and had fun! A friend has just moved in 5 minutes away from me! I'm going to try and find wild garlic at some point this week and make scones. I will also make peanut butter granola. I will eat tasty delicious food that I cook in my clean kitchen, and I will try to drink more water this week and eat a bit more fruit and hopefully go twice to pilates.

I have so much annual leave so I'm taking next Friday off and I think I'm just going to sew most of the day (and maybe go to the sauna or something)

but I REFUSE to wallow about cancelled plans, and I refuse to spend this evening working on my thesis when I was meant to be having fun.

anyway things to do:

finish draft of politics of migration essay

organise bibliography

1 hour on dissertation

email I., B., R.

clean bathroom

tidy room

refusing to let a full time job/full time masters/running an asso combo stop me from having a nice life.

January fun includes : Walthamstow Wetlands walk & a 2 hour yoga class on New Year's Day, a Wednesday night wheel throwing pottery class, calisthenics on Sundays, finding a very long walk to do next weekend too, going to my brother's for homemade pasta ...

Apparently I read 42 books but I feel like a lot of them were quite mediocre.

Books I actually enjoyed a lot:

Orbital by Samantha Harvey, as good as everyone says. Very beautiful, very tender, good for having some hope in humanity

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, I had no idea about the historical context of this novel so I was genuinely engrossed (and I guess quite dumb for not knowing!)

Monumenta by Lara Haworth, because I love contemporary fiction set in the Balkans and I especially loved reading something contemporary from Belgrade (I weirdly miss living there a lot at the moment!)

Things I didn't like:

Evenings and Weekends is weirdly overhypyed and strangely omnipresent; don't bother. Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child and Ben, in the World were creepy and thought provoking. IDK if there's an English translation forthcoming but Pour une ecologie pirate was underwhelming, as was 2066

I also read approximately 30 trashy romance novels, untracked, but a heavy weight on my brain nonetheless.

Next year... I want to read less but 'better' (as in: slower, more attentive). Crooked Plow is top of the list for book club in January, plus all the books I bought back from Paris that I haven't read yet.

Also I signed up for my new library card last week : so here is a solemn promise that, for the first 3 months of 2025, I will not buy a single book and I will only read books I already own and physical library books <3

There's so many socks from 52 weeks of socks that I want to make!

But for my next sweater I want to make a dupe of this Toast sweater on the left with this pattern on the right; knit with a more more ease and a slightly longer neck I think it will be almost spot on. Colour undecided. Maybe green though?

And then I really want to make a mini scout shawl; this is going to take forever to knit but I think it will be such a fun challenge. Probably will knit it in sock yarn (maybe Onion's nettle sock yarn, maybe lang jawoll, maybe filcolana arwetta) so that if I end up not really working on it much or messing it up, I can just make socks instead hehe

I don't know if I'm making the right choice but at least I'm making a choice.

Although I still feel hurt by what happened, I can also see how our relationship could have been becoming something that wasn't what either of us wanted; I still think there could have been ways to work on it that weren't breaking up, but I am trying at least to work on those parts of myself I don't like.

The physical distance makes it feel more over than it has so far and that's probably for the best (I saw him three times in the week before I left)

Getting dumped by the man you thought you were going to spend many more years with will do that to a gal !