Being just over the limit
I have been pushing myself over sensible limits for a very long time. The crowdfunding was huge and it blocked me from doing all the other things that hold life in balance – keeping up with Boodaville regular tasks to manage projects, planning my summer trip, life admin, and properly looking after my wellbeing.
As I said to Robin the other day, the way it works is that I give people jobs to do, I pay them what we agree to pay, but ultimately if a job doesn’t get done then I do it. Examples are tidying up Boodaville Finca (This is a ridiculously difficult job for anyone else because I have special “Matter Out Of Place” goggles that other people don’t have – so there’s ALWAYS more tidying that I do on a quiet weekend). This year, another example of me stepping in and taking over a task was – running a crowdfunding campaign.
So by June I was out of sync and tired. Me and Bernat didn’t even have the summer kids calendar written down (another job that falls to me.. except this year I didn’t have capacity)
Surviving Summer
The knock on effects were several months of living day to day with work piling up behind me, and the worst of everything was getting sick in the 38 degree summer heat at the beginning of our road trip through France on the 18th July, just me and my two kids.
I love adventure, but this was all too much. The recovery from this flu type bug was slow and incremental as I spent a month mainly doing summer activities, taking just a little time to focus on my health each day. A big uptick was when I got anti-biotics for my throat on day 2 of the Warwick Folk Festival.
We were travelling without a base (except that one week in a tent in a Cornish field) just finding ideas of where to stay, as cheap as possibly from day to day.
Random Drama
The trip also had this crazy spattering of random drama, totally unrelated to us, that added to the melee. You probably won’t even believe me but all of this happened –
1) A gas bottle exploded in the middle of the camping field at Warwick Folk festival resulting in fire buckets being needed then a helicopter and 3 ambulances. (noone was seriously injured)
2) At the campsite in Cornwall the police were hanging around and then one day came by to interrogate us at breakfast. We were using the neighbours campervan to sleep in because Kira got too upset by spiders in the tent on Day 4, and it turns out this camper van was of interest to the police.
We don’t know the full story because we were freaked out and left the campsite – but we know the mum from the family in the next door pitch got arrested that evening. The police lied to me while we were chatting, and gave some incredibly UNinvited parenting advice. It was a horrible experience.
3) The day before I flew the kids back to Barcelona from Bristol (unbeknownst to me thank goodness), the runway broke and all flights were cancelled. So when we arrived and checked in at the airport on Saturday 9th August they had overbooked the flight.
An older man with glasses gave us two seats for three humans and told us it would probably be fine. We got to the gate and a different Easyjet employee told us “this has been done wrong, you can’t have a kid without a seat” sit down here. So we were assigned to a side bench with one other man. We started chatting, which was an interesting tactic because we were four people and if everyone showed up at the gate there were only three seats on the plane; either me and my kids, or this man, wouldn’t be on the plane.
As we chatted we learnt that this man from Barcelona had ALREADY missed a flight the day before because of the runway situation and this was the second time he would be sent home if he didn’t get on the plane. My kids were going back to leave for a family holiday the next morning.
Of course I made the hilarious suggestion that the kids go without me – I didn’t even want to go to Barcelona I was just delivering them to Bernat. It didn’t go down well. It was an incredibly tense situation. The last two passengers with seats booked showed up really late, we saw an attempt not to let them on the plane and heard the woman getting cross and bossy saying “well my luggage is on the plane so it’ll take you ages to get it off so you have to let us on”. I offered to sit Joanna on my lap, they said no.
And then the situation got saved by… a guitar. We had noticed a man with a big guitar.. way bigger than the allowed hand luggage. He had bought a seat for his guitar. The staff offered him 300€ to put it safely in the overhead compartment instead of a seat, and he made a bit of drama but accepted it. I don’t know whether me jumping in the conversation across the room “If you don’t do this either us or him don’t get on the plane” helped sway his decision or I just sounded like the crazy lady I am. Heehee “crazy lady” makes me think of the grandma in Moana movies.
I do like to think of myself as this kind of wild, alternative, character doing a mixture of brilliant and silly things.
August without the kids
Back in Barcelona I had nowhere to sleep (except the emergency option of the sofa in the same hot flat as my kids while they packed for holidays with Dad, which would have been a total nightmare). As I contacted people in the city I heard from Robin that a good friend of his had suddenly died, a devastating shock in their community. My first reaction was to go to the hospital where they still hadn’t actually switched off Mathieu’s machine. I wasn’t needed there, he was surrounded by friends and it would have been the exact opposite of finding a bed. Hotels and hostals available on booking were 400€ upwards, and then Alfred saved me by offering me a bed at the HUB. I got an amazing nights sleep, spent time with some lovely people, got some life admin done, then headed back to my car in Bristol as planned.
The rest of August was a combination of amazing days with friends, less drama, then really busy times at Boodaville Finca: a Regenerative Weekend – without too much heat!! (but with the Caseres town fiestas), a Living Permaculture weekend (ok – there was excess drama here) then a week of intense accounting to see whether we can actually buy a vineyard now. We can’t – we needed to get much closer to the optimum target on the crowdfunder!
I could measure weeks from now on with an “excess drama” level. Ranging from a score o 0.5 for a glass of milk smashed across the floor at bedtime, to 5 for “everyone except Hardik arriving late or cancelling the Living Permaculture weekend”, and so on.
To top it all off Robin organised our Boodaville Celebration (with support from me) during the week I moved back into the Torredembarra flat and got kids back to school after the summer. I loved the celebration until Sunday morning when I had to be silent then stay in bed and miss the last activities in order to take care of myself, and gather what strength I could for getting the kids to school the next day.
This week
The point of this post is to process and recognise that now the intensity has finally finished, after a soul restoring trip to La Pesquera this week to swim in paradise waters, and the return of some routine.. I’m back! I’m writing!
Oh, I forgot the car wash story. You’ll have to guess the details: it was definitely silly not brilliant, and involved putting the money in while the pressure washer pistol was on the floor, getting wet then chasing it and jumping on it. You have to find ways to liven up the mundane right? I was alone when I did it and me and Kira cried with laughter when I told her the next day.