Workaholic

Okay, okay, I'll admit it. I'm addicted. Not only to chocolate and reading and British humour, but also to working. My contract says I have to work for 24 hours, but most weeks I easily make 30, often more. Why? Because it's fun. I like my job, I like the people I work with, I like sorting out the difficult backlog and dividing projects up into smaller bits and seeing those smaller bits completed and finally the big thing completed and having happy co-workers and managers when the thing that they didn't have the time or energy for to fix is finally done. But it's more than fun, it's addictive.
I've always been that way, having things done and handing stuff in at least 2 days before the deadline. Whenever we got an assignment in which you could choose your own topic, I thought about it on the way home and e-mailed my topic to my instructor as soon as I got home. Even if it was week 3, and the essay wasn't due until week 16. And then I would finish the essay itself somewhere around week 14, when others were frantically trying to come up with a topic.
So it's the truth: I like to work. I like to be busy, to create things, to think things through, to solve problems. I'm a workaholic.

Which is nice, most of the time, especially for your co-workers and group mates. It's sometimes less nice for your blood pressure, or the amount of sleep you need, or your social life. And sometimes it's less nice for you yourself, when you get a burn out or suddenly find yourself at 2 am working on some report that isn't due until next week, realising you haven't seen your friends in over a month and haven't cleaned your toilet in even longer.
I've never found myself there, I do seem to have some sort of track-keeper that goes off when I've been working too much, and makes me relax and take my mind of things for a while. Also, as I mentioned before, I really like my job, so it doesn't always seem like 'work'.

The thing is, when I don't like doing something, it really hits me hard. When I try to find excuses not to prepare things, or arrange things, or contact people, which makes that I find myself unprepared or grumpy or sleepy at an important moment.
This was the case with my teacher training. I liked doing it while I was doing it, teaching, but the whole preparation and filling-in-forms and reading difficult didactic textbooks really wasn't my thing. So I didn't put any time, or energy, or effort into it. I just tried to wing it, which is not something you can do in front of 30 12-year-olds. At least not until you've had some practice.

So I quit. This is really weird for me, because I hardly ever quit anything studywise or workwise. Actually, make that never. But for the first time, work was costing me more energy than it was giving me. It made me grumpy and demotivated and tired and trying to avoid the work I had to do. So quitting was the only way forward.
And I feel really good about it. It feels like a weight has been lifted, and I'm finally free to move again. Ironically, the first thing I did was accept a really big assignment from my publisher, which I will have to do in my own time. But that's okay, because I like doing it. And now, I can do what I like to do 5 days a week!

Carving out a garden

Yesterday was the first properly spring-y day we've had the whole year (except 2 really warm days in February that were just too much out of sync to count), so we decided to do some stuff in the garden. When our house was renovated, the builders pulled out every plant in the garden and made a new path to the shed, but left everything else bare. Which means that the only green thing in there were some sad patches of grass, and the pots containing the plants that we took with us from our old garden.
So off we went to the garden centre to buy some new plants. Apart from some lavender, rosemary, thyme, strawberries, and seed packages, we also came home with a neat little bird house and 120 litres of soil, which we reckoned would be enough to get us through the day.
Back home, we started to turn the soil. This was more difficult than it sounds, because after about 5 cm of earth you get into this really dense grey clay that has been sitting in a big lump for the last 500 years and doesn't really want to be anything else than a big lump. Also, there used to be a pretty big tree in the garden, and although that was cut down and removed the roots are still firmly embedded in the clay, leaving strangely yellow vines of very hard wood. That's about 50% of the garden, the other 50% is just white/yellow building sand, about as infertile as the Sahara. So after 15 minutes, the 120 litres of black soil had disappeared, mixed in to create a strangely grayish mixture.
We continued to loosen up the ground, in the process discovering the shards of what must once have been a complete window, several pens, marbles, Christmas decorations, wrappers, bottle caps, stones, bricks, solidified pieces of cement, foil, and other things you do not want in your garden if you intend on eating what you put in the ground. We now have a full trash bag of 'foreign stuff'  and are only about a quarter done. I am very curious what other things will come up.
We put in some of the new plants and some of the old plants (which one of our cats has attempted to dig up already) and went back to the garden centre, where we bought another 200 l of soil. Just to be on the safe side. I mean really, you can never have to much fertilised muck stacked up in the back of your garden.
Today appears less sunny than the weather reports would have us believe, but we still have a load of strawberry plants and other things ready to be put in, so we'll continue to carve a garden out of the clay and yellow sand for the coming weeks. We also still have to clear out and sort out the shed, which is now just filled with stuff that we didn't have room for anywhere else. And then we're going to buy a nice hard-wooden garden furniture set to replace the white plastic one that I bought for 10 euros at thrift shop when I was living in my student room.
Let's hope the summer will be long and warm enough for us to enjoy the fruits of our garden labours, edible or otherwise!