The Scottish word ‘Scunnered’ sums up my feelings for today!

I started this blog, my Youtube channel and hopefully will start soon, my podcast, all with the tagline ‘helping you to find more joy in yours (ie your slice of life)…….

And here I am struggling to find it in mine!

There have been a few incidents of late which have triggered this:

1 – Took our dearest son to his swimming lesson and when we tried to leave – we found our car wouldn’t start. We have a little portable jump starter box thing so I tried that. Of course, it hadn’t been charged up so didn’t have enough power to start the car.

A kind sould tried to jump start it for us, but that was also unsuccessful. This was when the rain started.

I phoned the breakdown people, ran out of credit, topped up the credit and phoned them again. Thats when the phone went down to one bar and I had no way of charging it!

I had thought the exceptionally low amount of fuel in the car, combined with being parked on a slope might have been the cause. At this point, I would like to point out, in my defence, I had intended to top up the petrol but had a touch of sunstroke after spending a day shovelling woodchip, but thats a different story.

So, after phoning the breakdown people, I decided: hubby stays with car, dear son and I walk to get petrol (around 3 mile trip, maybe more). However, a very kind individual at the swimming pool gave us a lift to the petrol station, waited for me to get said petrol AND took us back!! Thats a rare find these days, in my experience.

I put the petrol in and tried the engine again – nothing.

The breakdown people said they’d be with us within 4 hours, which would have taken us to 10pm. Luckily they got a local guy who was with us in 2. He gave that sucker a mega jump and we were good to go.

“Just take it for a long run”, he said.

Now, if that helpful person hadn’t taken us to get petrol, I wouldn’t have been able to do that. He also said, “You need a new battery and I’d get that starter motor looked at too”.

That brings us to the next issue…..

2 – I contacted a local car parts company to see how much the battery would be: £80. Thats the cheap option. When I bought the battery thats currently in the car just 5 years ago, it was £50 something. As I don’t have a spare £80 just now, I’ve decided to keep the little jump box fully charged.

Needless to say, I haven’t enquired about the starter motor yet.

3 – The next cause of my positivity drop is our fridge-freezer. Its dead. Its been playing up for months and we even lost all our food on one occasion. However I found that if I pull it out from the wall, hoover the grill thingy at the back (technical term), then put it back in place, it kind of works for a bit.

I did just that a few days ago, pulling several muscles in strange places and ripping the lino to bits as I went. All to no avail – its dead. The stuff in the freezer is sort very cold in places depending where it had been stored but the ice cream was drinkable – not that I’d recommend it! I’ll also have to make a soup of sorts to disguise what veg is left.

4 – Ok, the last one might seem a bit odd to you.

To take my mind off the car/fridge-freezer situation, I thought, “I’ll upload my next video to my youtube channel”. Its an update video about our allotment but its already a little out-of-date as we’ve done a lot of work there since it was taken. Thats when I thought I’d do a short intro to camera explaining this – something I’ve never done before (don’t even have my face on here yet and this is a supportive sort of place!).

Six attempts later, I showed dear son the one I thought had worked out best….and he laughed.

So, I’ve deleted all of them and come to the conclusion I have a ‘radio face’. Oh well!!

I keep telling myself things like:

‘positivity’

‘resilience’

‘keep going’

‘don’t give up’….

You know the sort of thing.

Then I see the pile of ironing, the dirty dishes in the sink, the notes for blog posts I’ve not done yet, the weeds I haven’t pulled yet and I say to myself, “to hell with it, get a coffee, listen to some music and wait…..the positivity will return”!

Hey, you know what? I’m starting to feel better already!