A Bump in the Road

It has been quite a while since we did a post on the blog.  Every now and again events conspire to distract us from our path, and then out of the blue things are suddenly different to what they were yesterday. This is probably not a bad thing, because it gives us a chance to catch our breath, slow down and enjoy our piece of “paradise” and reassess where we are going. It also gives us a chance to recharge our batteries.

About two months ago I pulled some muscles in my hip, which ended up giving me a constant low grade pain. We have a friend who did some damage to his shoulder and (as many people do) he couldn’t resist the temptation to keep working on tasks that needed doing. The result was more damage on top of the existing muscle tears. We didn’t want to take the risk of something similar happening. As my pain didn’t go away, even after a couple of weeks of rest, we basically put most of our gardening and building activities on hold.

At first I found this enforced rest, very hard to adapt to. And as much of the everyday workload had to be taken up by Heather she found it hard as well. The frustration of it all started to get us down, until Heather had a brainwave. She suggested we do something we hadn’t done in a long time - visit our local library and check out the fiction shelves. (Most of our reading over the past 10 years has been all about practical things like growing food or building things.) The visit to the library saved our sanity as we rediscovered the joys of reading novels. In fact we were going through several great stories each week- totally absorbed in the lives of the characters we were reading about. Whilst all this was going on, I went for a few tests to make sure my aches were nothing more than just strained muscles. The results all came back ok and this also helped take any pressure off our minds- it just became a waiting game.

One of the consequences of feeling a bit low and wanting to be distracted by other things is that we steered clear of our blog. It was too much of a reminder of the work that we had planned to do. We needed to have a break for a while and feel good about it.

Just over a week ago our next lot of Helpers from Helpx.com arrived;  just as the pain in my side was finally beginning to reduce.  They not only helped with many tasks – especially more heavy duty ones, but they also inspired us to put our “toe back in the water” and start getting back into action. We will write more about Karen and Alex in our next post.

Right now we are happy to report that things are getting back on track. We have started planting our summer garden, are getting stuck into some fire prevention work, are about to commence work on the remodelling of our barn ( http://www.tenderbreak.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/the-year-of-barn.html) and are feeling better about blogging again.  However this whole episode has left one legacy – we have now rediscovered the habit of getting absorbed in a good work of fiction. Each night (and even during the daytime sometimes if it is a particularly riveting story) we settle down to read before bed. In fact we’ll finish this post right here, because that is exactly what we are going to do right now!