Mostly Wet.

Today has been grey and wet and there's a yellow weather warning for squalls and heavy rain from 6.00 tonight.

My thoughts have been turning to ways in which I can improve my mood/ wellbeing/ mental heath (whichever term you prefer to use) because although physically my body is aging my brain is still functioning and I might as well use it. The main thing that affects me is when things aren't done and it feels as if life is stagnating. Apart from reminding Peter to keep contacting them there's little I can do about the delay in getting trades people in to do work on the house so I need to set that on one side. But there are a lot of things I plan to do but don't seem to get round to doing. I just hate it when one day runs into another with nothing achieved. To stop myself spiralling into misery I decided to begin by writing down those tasks, who doesn't love a list? breaking each task into steps. Sometimes it just seems that there are too many obstacles to doing the whole job but if I can cross off a step at a time my mood will lift and I'll be that much closer to completing the job. And writing down all the current projects means that if it's fine I can do one thing outside and if it's wet there'll be something to achieve indoors.

It was reasonably dry to start with in the morning so I gathered up all the stuff I needed and made a start on putting up the white guttering. Step one was to cut a piece to size and fit it along the side of the terrace. I then went on to put up more brackets which involved drilling new holes. It was fiddly but I got the longest piece of gutter up and sloping the right way. At that point it was beginning to rain and my back wasn't happy either so I called a halt. So job not finished but it's over half-way done. All that needs doing now is a few more brackets and the final short section ending in a downpipe.

In the meantime Peter went off to the dump taking another full bag of garden waste. Before he went I cut down the almost 6ft tall michaelmas daisies which had turned brown last week with the drop in night temperatures. I hope they don't get any taller next year.

After an hour with my feet up watching the surfers through the window I got on with admin and then did some Duo Lingo. A fun one today, one minute I'm being asked to translate sentences such as The tiger in the office does not like Owen's parsnips. and Owen was eating snails yesterday. and the next it sets me the challenge of translating Radio.

I can hear the rain on the flat roof of my study but we've got hearty soup for supper and then the final episode of House of the Dragon to watch.