Lately...

...I have had another madly busy week.  Days when I have felt like I have met myself coming back.  My head is full of lists of food for meals that I won't even cook.  My car is sat waiting on the drive packed with enough food to feed 22 people for four days, poised to be dropped off later today.  Once again my time is being given to volunteering and this week has confirmed to me that a decision I made a few weeks back is absolutely the right one.  I have been tasked with sorting out the food for a group attending a week long, international Scout camp.  I myself will be going for the second half of the week and will take another car load of food for those days.  By the time I do go I know that I will have had enough of shopping it is my least favourite activity at the best of times especially when I have to to into shops I wouldn't normally, but six hours of food shopping is enough to tip anyone over the edge, right?

My busy week has been interspersed with quiet days.  Days when I had so many offers I could have visited four or five different families.  Offers that I, sadly, had to turn down knowing that if we did too much we all be tired and crabby and that would not be good for me or anyone else.  It is hard, this saying no business but it is the right thing to do.  Honesty is a good policy.  There was a time when I would have felt that I couldn't say no as I would damage my relationships or there would be no more offers in the future and I always had those memories of my early days of home edding in my head when we didn't see anyone from one week to the next.

Being at home a little more this week has meant that the radio has been on more than usual.  I have forced myself to sit still to relax and rest, and do a bit of knitting, oh how I have missed that these past few months.  But the radio has not been relaxing these past few days, or weeks when I have listened for that matter.  There is much conflict in the world, conflict that we don't always hear about that rumbles on continuously and then it gets much worse and it makes it into the news.  News that is difficult to stomach and hard to comprehend when you live in a country that is at peace and has been for a very long time.  Fingers are pointed, trust has all but gone, fingers are pointed and blame is apportioned before evidence has been gained, it makes for very difficult listening.

My own conflicts that I have wrestled with these past few months are not over yet.  The decision I mentioned before may have been made but my commitments are not over yet, one next week, one at the end of the month and another in October.  The time they take is time I am not spending with my children, and theirs and my friends but it will end, unlike the conflicts elsewhere.  So whilst I look a the detritus littering my hall, bits of food labelled and ready to be taken with me next week, shoes in abundance, a folded laundry box, my knitting, it is the same in the rest of the house, I know that this time will pass.

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Blogger has informed me that is my 600th post!  Can't quite believe it :)