Cycles: 20260119-20260419

It’s almost three months to the day since I last wrapped up my thoughts of the unfurling year. Let’s be honest, 2026 has been a bit of a shit show so far. With so much attention grabbing events I’ve had to give myself a good talking to, and actively resist feeding my anxiety with the anxiety feed. I’ve also given myself a ‘get out of jail free’ card for not committing to the various ambitions I cooked up in the first few weeks of the new year. My current approach is to make sure the important stuff gets done, stay positive, everything else can come later or not at all. Along with that goes the events I’ve failed to recognise between my previous post and this one: some stuff happened, some of it great, I work with great people, some have moved to new adventures, it’s warmer and dryer.

I don’t know about you but the green spaces around me are ALIVE! The two trees opposite my home are full of pink blossom. My garden is vibrant green and I’m playing catch-up with spring’s momentum. I’ve managed to get a few tomato plants in the raised beds and nestled a mint plant in amongst them. I couldn’t resist buying and planting out a fern in a nice shady corner of the back garden. Ferns instantly take me on a nostalgic trip back to my childhood, romping around the New Forest without a care in the world. Our local plant shop has them in several different shades so I suspect this will be the first of many.

I’m currently reading the River Cottage Veg Patch Handbook to get some ideas of what to with our limited space. There’s a few priorities this year; water preserving and re-routing for the pond and surrounding plants, re-building the raised beds and creating some supports for hanging squash and lastly setting up a bee hotel on the sun-trapped wall opposite our garden shed. But it’s mid-April aready and I feel like at risk of missing out on another year. Time to get my fingers green!

Over the weekend I caught a bug. Not the one doing the rounds but that of website tinkering. I really enjoyed stealing some time to rediscover some forgotten areas of my site and spending my time wisely on something creative.

This week was particularly rewarding at work too. I’ve been running a JTBD survey and had to be inventive in my approach. The software I’m using doesn’t support matrix questions or question routing. I’ve ended up with a bit of a ‘kludge’ but I spared my participants question fatigue which was my main concern and getting some interesting results. Using Google Sheets to reshape the response exports and analyse the results has actually been really fun and I’ve learned a lot.

Making time for things is half of the battle but when you do, it’s magical! To round off my week I went on a solo bike ride that took in some of the South Downs Way. It’s absolutely stunning out there! I can’t tell you how long it took or the distance as I no longer track my activity. Instead I’m trying to stay present in the moment and stop to take some photos.