As I write this, I have a cat that’s reminding me it’s time to go to bed – and before I do, to feed her. She’s not starving, she can wait a few minutes. I wanted to take a quick couple of minutes to write about what I’ve been up to and what I’ll be doing from this week through to the end of October.

October is a hard month for me. It used to be a favourite when I had Rod in my life. We had both our birthdays and our Anniversary, so the month was one fun stretch of dinners out and fun little surprises – received – and given. Now? Well. I turn 61 this month. I have some plans for the day, so that’s good, and I am excited for it, so it’s not all doom and gloom. I have found that keeping myself well occupied really helps with the sadder moments, and so to that end, I plan to keep myself busy doing good things.

Currently, the Concept 2 Fall Team Challenge is on. It started on the 15th of September and goes through to October 15th (my wedding anniversary). I had completely forgotten about it, so as of tomorrow I’ll be hopping on the rower and putting in 1 or 2k a day to add to my team’s final score. Then on the 25th, the first day of the Skeleton Crew Challenge starts. I’ve succeeded in this challenge for 2 years in a row (the goal is to accumulate 31,000 meters between the 25th and 31st October, on your own. If I can do that three years running, I’ll be very pleased indeed! Plus, these two challenges should keep me in good stead for getting through the hard days.

That’s what the next few weeks look like for me. Looking back, starting the beginning of May, I changed Internet providers and am pleased with the new service, but it wasn’t without numerous challenges for me. My modem router wasn’t giving very decent speed at all, not what the line was able to provide so then came a series of trials of various modems. I finally settled on one, but wasn’t happy that the Wi-Fi side of things made my home automations (such as lights turning on when people walk into a room and other, more fun things), not work at all or not work as well as they could and should. So, I experimented with Wi-Fi extenders. This didn’t help a lot. I finally bought a router to add to the mix, and that got things up to speed in a good way. With one small but oh so major problem. The Wi-Fi password we’ve used forever had a space in it, and this router simply did not allow that. Which meant I’d have to update every single Wi-Fi device in the house. The speed and connectivity difference was so much better, though, that like an idiot I took a deep breath and changed the password to one that was allowed. Looking back, I should have just packed that sucker up and found another router that wouldn’t cause me to have to reset every device everywhere. It was a daunting task! Some things I had to look up online to find out how to get the device into a mode to change the Wi-Fi settings. I think there’s roughly 46 devices around the place. That’s a lot of things to change. And silly me, since I was going to change the password, and since I can no longer use VCSWEB as a business name (a story for another day), I also changed the SSID (Wi-Fi name) from VCSWEB to MN-Zone. This was short for Mature Nerd Zone, my new business name. So, the job is just about finished and my automations are almost back to where they were before or better, but it was a heck of a lot of work

Which brings me to work … I seem to have a lot of it currently. This is great but since it’s only me here, and I also need to take care of the house, the cat, and the feeding and self-care of myself, sometimes it’s really hard to get everything done. I’ve had to learn to forgive myself on the days my brain doesn’t work right or when I have medical appointments or other things crop up. But I do enjoy the work that I do, and love it even more since moving all my clients to the best wholesale web company in Australia. Everyone’s websites are nice and quick, making doing updates a breeze. Now if I could just steal a few moments to work on THIS website, so I can add in the Instagram photos and work on adding recipes. I’ll get there, but I think that’s going to be yet another challenge too!

Meanwhile, my cat is getting more insistent that it’s definitely past my bedtime. Again! Until next time, stay safe but go have some fun too!

Cheers!