It’s Monday morning. 🌞 I didn’t feel a sense of urgency to write a post on the weekend specifically. I published my last Stylesheet post on Saturday, so I didn’t feel a rush to write a post yesterday. Yesterday, Nick and I went for a long walk in the afternoon after lunch, to help him break in his new hiking shoes. We have a trip planned to Tasmania next month and I’m quite excited because we’re going to do the 11 kilometre Wineglass Bay and Hazards Beach circuit at Freycinet National Park. Our whole trip will be a road trip around the state. I think Tasmania is a beautiful place. It’s definitely my cup of tea with all of its beautiful nature and opportunities to enjoy time and space outdoors.

I don’t actually have proper hiking boots! When we went to the Blue Mountains and did the Mermaids Cave and Cox’s Cave hikes, I just wore my waterproof sneakers. I love them and they’re comfortable, and I could walk for days in them, but because they are waterproof I’ve learned that they take days and days to dry when they get wet. Not to mention, I think they are a bit less appropriate for more intense hikes (although the Cox’s Cave circuit was like a grate 4 difficulty haha). I did have my eyes on a brown hiking boot which I think will be a good choice. I love hikes but sometimes Nick is less keen because we need to do more preparation, and he obviously wants to have time for other activities too. My ass just wants to hike non stop. 😂

Geoff and I released our second Toast & Roast podcast of the year, you can check it out on Simplecast or wherever you listen to your podcasts! I don’t love to share behind-the-scenes type stuff, but we have had to record double episodes in a row because of time constraints and either of us being away from home or having other commitments. I’m not sure how interested people are, generally, about how much work actually goes into making a podcast. 🥴 But before we started back up again this year, I decided I would be way more committed to spending more time promoting the podcast on social media and more effort into sharing snippets of our older episodes. God, we basically turned into content creators unintentionally. 😭😂

Last night I decided to finally watch the Fyre Festival documentary on Netflix, which had been on my list for several years. It was worth it! It was around 9:30pm and I couldn’t really be bothered doing anything else, so I folded laundry while I watched. Glad I finally got around to it. I don’t spend a lot of time watching Netflix (or anything, really 😛), but I do have several things on my list that I added literally years ago, some of which I actually still intend to watch. Yo, I still haven’t jumped on the bandwagon and watched Squid Game. I will be very late to that party. But I don’t really care, haha.

There are two things I feel like I’ve started doing this year – or at least in the past few weeks because it’s still January – that have left me feeling quite good, mentally. The first is I’ve spent more time being conscious about the tasks I set out to do. I am trying to limit myself to attempting to doing one task well, each day. It could be anything, like writing a blog post, or could be cleaning some part of the house, or something related to exercise and wellness. I remember having the mentality of focusing on doing one thing in a given day, and even though that’s rather easy to do, it’s a mindset that easily falls to the wayside as we fill up our to-do lists. It’s a lot easier to focus when you intentionally focus on one thing.

The other thing is that I’ve really, truly tried to listen to myself, especially when I’m not feeling mentally well, or need to take a break. Reflecting back on last year… I was so burned out in the latter half of last year that my behaviour to those people close to me was fraught with upset emotions. I only realise this now, that I was truly struggling, a lot of which was to do with poor work/life balance and not giving myself the time and space to recover. I’ve really been trying to prioritise that. For me that looks like… well, if it means taking more time to exercise, if it means sleeping in, or just starting work late, taking regular breaks… I’m trying to do that, I guess before it’s too late and before I start going down a slippery slope with my mental health. I hope to be generally better at that this year. 🌻