I finally got around to updating the theme on this blog. While I loved the look of the old one, it had so many problems due to endless errors caused by the winning combination of Genesis and a theme designer that had disappeared, that it was completely unusable. So it was time for a change.

In the months since I’ve neglected this site, I’ve created another blog, and completely relaunched two other old blogs (yeah, I know…). While I’m still working on getting a bunch of other sites moved, updated, and generally overhauled (I have a lot of decisions to make!), I wanted to come back to this site in the meantime.

This blog is an actual mess. It’s definitely one of those cases of “do as I say, not as I do.” The last big overhaul I changed it to a WordPress Multisite with the intention of spawning lots of little projects off of it. I didn’t have time to do that at all – even one recipe takes a ton of time (food bloggers, I salute you!), and now I’m thinking about what should be where, and how everything should look.

I still love baking, but I don’t really get the motivation for it much now, and I definitely don’t have the time. It’s one of those things I can see being on the back burner (sorry) for a long time, and although I definitely want an easily accessible place for my recipes, I could just put them in a Google Doc or something *shrugs*

So long story short, this site is still a work in progress. The new theme still needs work, stuff needs fixing, everything is still a creative crazy mess. But it works – at least a technological, “not spewing errors everywhere all the time” kind of works.

Business as usual

Business – the business is still so much time, and so much fun. I don’t really write about it much anywhere – although I’ve been planning to for months! – mostly because I’m spending a lot of time in it. Phase one of all the hosting stuff we wanted to get set up has been done for a while, and though there are endless Trello lists, we’ve moving on to a couple of big projects. This is killing me because I’m such an ideas person…I can visualise everything being finished and how happy I’ll be, but we’re just at the beginning stages. Patience not being my strong point has definitely driven the company forward a lot more and a lot faster, but I always need to be careful it doesn’t become more of a disadvantage than an advantage.

Meow updates

Gemma asked me to provide an update on Ginge. He’s doing fine, he definitely doesn’t have as much energy as he used to; even though he still has a chasing and fighting and hunting instinct, he can’t actually manage to go through with any of it. I said to Joe, “The only thing worse than Ginge being well is Ginge being ill.” You’d think that our household would be more peaceful, but both the girls have been more aggressive because of it, and Dee also has problems with her teeth now which means even more trips to the vet.

Health & spending, revisited

On top of that, we’ve decided to concentrate more on our health, including drinking more water and raising our gym/swim cards from the dead. It’s been so long since we went they’ve actually changed the style of the cards now (!) But we got a warm welcome back, which was nice, and I’ve started couch to 5k again. Let’s see how long that lasts! When I first became self-employed, it felt like such a positive fresh start and I got much healthier and lost some weight. But now I’m allll the way back at square one again, because I love food. That’s it. No excuses, no “I’ve been really busy.” Having more money to play with means we’re in more danger of slipping back into old habits of eating out all the time, or getting food delivered, or getting a takeout. So we’re consciously putting a stop to that. It’s our one thing we really enjoy, since we don’t smoke and I can probably count on one hand the amount of drinks I’ve had in the past three years.

We don’t really buy too much else – I’ve even managed to curb my addiction for photography props, at least temporarily – but overspending on food isn’t something we need to be doing. So to get away from work, gym or swim is the perfect low-cost solution. Living in a city means easy access to everything, and that can be either a positive or a negative. With the days starting to get longer, it just feels like there’s more time, and we’ve made the effort to not work quite so much when possible. We’ve done some fun stuff, we’ve spent some money, and now it’s time to try and get back into something resembling a proper routine.

This week has been so good…cinema, arcade, brunch, gaming, home cooked roast, lake, pub. Planning new things for the business, catching up on little tasks. Can’t imagine ever going back to an office 💛 pic.twitter.com/nTkZRU3Tm2

— Jenni Brown 🍉 (@madebyjenni) February 15, 2019

So I’m off to do a bit more work on this theme, and I’ll see you around soon! ♥