The Quirky Bird is looking for a temporary Bird Hoose

We have decided to rent a house for a while. This is not ideal by any stretch of the imagination, giving the quantity of our processions, my plants collection, 2 greenhouses, 5 full or part time kids, 2 cats, a tank of fish, chickens and a fuzzy dog! But there really isn't an ideal new home for the Quirky Bird gardener, partner, kids and all of the above on the market at the moment. It would be easy to rush into buying somewhere that wasn't quite right and then regret it at our leisure.

Interesting but maybe not

Finding a rental house somewhere that fits all of us, our stuff, is still easily commutable to work for David and I and keeps Dan at his school and is rural is not easy and we have 7 weeks in which to find somewhere that ticks all those boxes. Again back to trawling the internet for suitable places, yawn. Then there is the cost of renting some where! Ouch, that's more than I was paying for a mortgage, and full of old scaffy furniture, hey ho, keep looking. We did look at one place at the weekend, huge converted barn, tiniest garden ever. Really no space for my plants, greenhouse or to exercise the dog and it would be a two hour round trip to work every day for me which does not fill me with joy at all.

Because of all the stress, organising and work of moving house, working full time, trying to fit everything in I really miss getting time to do the things I really enjoy doing for me and ultimately for my loved ones too. I am an artistic creative person and not having time to do those things really doesn't do me much good. I have been reassessing what I actually want out of life, my life. Being potentially half way through my life and after the past few years I've had, it makes you think

Holiday Treats

Part of the moving house and down sizing plan is to make time for those things, to actually claim some time and life back to live life how we want to, not feeling tied to doing things because we have to but doing things because we want too. Also to finally close doors on stressful events, reduce stress in live and move forward.

Things I want back in my life:

Hill Walking
This gal knows how to celebrate getting to the top of a mountain

Get back to reading, my book pile is huge and I used to read all the time,
One of the things on my bucket list is to read the top 100
literature classics, which is why I bought these three

Get back to some serious but fun photography

Lots more trips and travelling as a family and a couple

Tick more things off my bucket list

More cooking and baking

I am sure there are lots more thing, but they kinda run into each other's catagories above. Watch this space ................................

As for the gardens here at Easter Mosshat, the place that sparked this mad blogging lark, oh no its not a lark, its a quirky bird, ha ha. Sometimes when I go out into the garden I sad at the thought of leaving in seven weeks, other times  I sigh and think it will be so much better not to have the weight of such a huge place around my neck any more. Sometimes I can't bear to look at the garden because the memories come rushing at me.

Can't believed common spotted orchids have seeded in two of the
lawns, and were only seen because we haven't had a chance to
mow the lawns!

We haven't had much of a chance to do ant basic maintenance, not through choice or lack of interest but because it has done nothing but rain every weekend I have been off or I have been working. The lawns look like meadows and the weeds are taking control. I have fingers crossed for a dry weekend next and will have to wield a strimmer and weedkiller to regain some semblance of control.