Well, we had a lovely lunch and bloggers get together yesterday at Jim’s Kitchen in Portlaoise.  Many of the bloggers are in the book club so there was much chat about the current book, The Children’s Book by A S Byatt and while we are enjoying it, I don’t think anyone has finished it yet so we’ll be reviewing it in a week’s time instead of today!

Grannymar, Lily of Lily’s blog, Kathy from Rumblestrips, Susan of Queen of Pots, Steph of The Biopsy Report, Marion of Made Marion, Marie of Diary of a Country Wife and JBBC, Elly of Ellybabes.

Conversation ranged from weddings to blogging, from tweeting to blogging, from facebook to blogging and lots lots more but you do get the general gist. Grannymar did a lovely toast to kick it all off and then we indulged in a gorgeous lunch. 4 hours of solid chat – my jaws ached driving home!

Marion mentioned that she has deleted her facebook, linked in and twitter accounts and she blogs about it here. I totally get where she is coming from and admire her resolve.  I can still remember the cold turkey I experienced last February when I was taking part in Not Enough Hours and had to cut down on my time on the laptop.  I thought it would all be simple enough, a piece of cake actually when Owen left on the Thursday and by Monday I was practially gnawing my nails up to my knuckles!

Maybe it is because the kids are on holidays and I’m conscious that I need to be more organised with my time if I am going to have enough time to play and yet get some work done, maybe it is because we met up with Owen for an hour last week after our trip to the zoo (he is incredibly good with the kids – they both think he is the bee’s knees!) and then the third thing happened – meeting Marion and her feelings of liberation post-no facebook!

Fear not, I am not going to stop blogging and neither am I going to delete my Facebook account (simply for business reasons you understand!).  But a comment Owen made when he was on the Tubridy programme recently, that people compare losing their iphone to losing a partner, is really going to extremes and yet, I could see the possibilities, more and more people are becoming addicted to social media and to being connected to their businesses even while on holiday.  Yes, I admit it, I am addicted to my laptop and while I am getting to the stage that I need an iphone for the business, I am putting it off cos I know just how bad that could be!

Apparently, it takes 21 days to make or break a habit so here goes, for the month of July, I am climbing back on the ‘Not Enough Hours’ wagon – doing a detailed diary plan for the day ahead (cos otherwise with the kids on hols, the hours just disappear), restricting my laptop use and making plenty of time for fun. Sounds easy doesn’t it? It all starts tomorrow

And if I fail, maybe I might just have to follow Marion’s example

I’m having a little ‘Interiors Evening Event’ here at Garrendenny Lane Interiors.  What’s on offer is light refreshments, plenty of tips and hints, information regarding the latest trends, see the latest fabric and wallpaper collections, and avail of discounts as well as have a lovely evening.

The dates are Thursday 23rd April, Wednesday 29th April and Tuesday 5th May.  Time: 7.30-9.30 pm.  Numbers will be limited so am asking people to book.   If you live near Castlecomer and would like to come along, please email me at info@garrendennylane.ie to book your place.  I look forward to seeing you

Greetings and many thanks if you have popped by after watching me on RTE’s Not Enough Hours.  At the stage of writing this, I have to admit that I am somewhat nervous abouts seeing myself on national TV but am doing my best to keep myself occupied all day!  The whole ‘not enough hours’ process was great though, definitely worth doing and it’s helped me make some huge changes to my lifestyle.  If you’d like to read a full post on how I found the whole process, click here.

You’ll find this blog a mixture of posts on interiors, decorating, farming and anything else that is going on in my life – a bit like my normal day now really.  Today, for example, once the children went to school, I spent 2 hours with a client, an hour on the laptop and then an hour helping my husband retrieve 2 weanling heifers from a neighbour’s field. As the expression goes, chasing cattle may be excellent for the figure but it’s not so good for the temper!  Having said that, it could have been a lot worse!

Keith Shirley is showcasing businesses from Carlow and Kilkenny on his blog and I’d like to thank him for featuring my business today – he’s an avid blogger and twitterer as well as being an expert on all things technical.

I’d also like to thank everyone who emailed, texted or phoned me to wish me well, i t’s been much appreciated. And to Michelle for bringing me a bottle of bubbly this morning – we’ll enjoy it when the kids have gone to bed!  I’m not going to name out all my friends that I wish to thank just in case I forget someone but I’m going to say a special thanks to Madeleine who was interviewed (for her opinion on me) for the programme (but I don’t think they are using it as she kept saying I was wonderful and didn’t need any help!), who left up a bottle of wine and a lovely card to me when I was out earlier and who has been a brilliant support and friend in so many ways.  Thanks too to Owen, Teresa and June for sorting me out and most of all to Brian for putting up with me while I was going through the whole process!  He must really love me to go through all that

Carlow Nationalist

Many thanks to Keith Shirley of Shercom to alerting me to the fact that I’m featured in today’s Carlow Nationalist and for scanning and emailing it to me!  Not sure if I ever was a chaotic workaholic or indeed if I am super-efficient now but I can always dream (or try and persuade Owen to move in!)

The filming for ‘Not Enough Hours’ finished last Wednesday – a short chapter in my life that managed to change so much about what I do and how I feel.  When I think back to when Owen and Teresa (the series producer) visited for the first time, a couple of week before Xmas, I knew then I wasn’t as happy or contented or as efficient as I could or should be and in hindsight, I realise now too that I was feeling continually frustrated with myself too.

And why was that?  I have a fabulous husband who I love dearly, two wonderful healthy and beautiful children who I love with an intensity that’s almost unbearable at times, we’re both self-employed and enjoy everything that goes with that, live in a lovely rural environment, have plenty of true good friends and yet things didn’t seem quite what they should be.  One of the reasons we returned to Ireland almost 7 years ago was to have a good quality family life, where the children would enjoy living in the countryside and we would be able to spend lots of time together as a family. I was working late every night which in itself I enjoyed but was realising that if I kept going the way I was going, I soon wouldn’t enjoy it as much or perhaps at all …. While working from home was supposed to be the ideal, the home/work/family balance wasn’t working terribly well in that the boundaries had blurred so much I felt I was continually working, yet never had a sense of achievement.  As I said, I was working late at night, yet was procrastinating in the mornings and trying to multi-task when the children were home in the afternoons, doing things like checking emails at the same time as helping them with their homework.  And perhaps what was worst of all, I wasn’t laughing like I used to.

Between the challenges/tasks that were set and the interviews, I came to realise quite a few things about myself.  For example, that I never stopped to enjoy an achievement, I never rewarded myself for a task well done but once one task or challenge was completed, i was looking for the next one.  Apart from being exhausting, I don’t ever want to find myself doing that to my kids, while I do feel I celebrate their achievements and help them to feel proud of themselves, i don’t want them ever feeling that I’m not stopping to celebrate their achievements, making them rush on to the next hurdle.  I was also conscious that while I spent quite a bit of time doing homework with the children, letting them help me with little jobs such as gardening and baking etc, reading to them, I wasn’t actually playing properly with them – the sort of play where we all collapse on the ground in laughter or exhaustion whether it’s from rough and tumble play, football, catch etc.  In fact, I was probably doing what Owen would describe in his book as ‘multi-tasking’ – getting jobs done while letting them spend time with me.

I had forgotten this photo had been taken, the producer emailed it to me yesterday.  Owen et al wanted Brian  to be quite involved in the whole process from interviews to challenges and as well as the fact that it was all happening during his busiest time of the year with cows calving virtually non-stop, he really didn’t want to be doing ‘cheesy and corny’ things which I relayed to the producer – gosh, i feel embarrassed about that now as the challenges were great fun as well as useful.  The photo above was taken just after our archery challenge – you’ll have to tune in on the 1st to see how successful we were!!  Brian was getting about 3 hours sleep a night that week yet he was the first to say that we both really got a lot out of the 3 days the crew were with us, despite it all making him so much busier.

When Owen first said that I had to stop working at 9pm, I seriously thought he was referring to just the weekends and was gobsmacked to say the least when I realised he meant every night.  Well, at first I thought it was a ridiculously early time to stop working, I was even putting the children to bed earlier than normal and working like a demon from 7.30 till 9ish.  But once I got into the habit of making the mornings much more productive and working from a ‘closed to do’ list, I was getting more done as well as gaining a sense of achievement.  The old ‘Friday-it’s-the-weekend’ feeling has returned and the weekend feels like a weekend rather than a continuation of the week.  Playing with the children too isn’t just good for them too, the carefree, relaxed vibes really do come flooding back to us all.

Owen phoned me last Monday to see how I was getting on (that’s another great thing about the programme too, you get continual supportive phone calls while you are giving up your addictions/changing your life even if you do feel like a naughty school kid with the teacher checking up on you) and I said that the problem was that I had now gone the other way in that I felt ridiculously relaxed!  To which his reply was that that was fine as long as I was achieving to complete my closed list.  I had to admit I was still underestimating the length of time it was taking me to do things and still tended to leave things to the last day a bit but that in itself is a learning curve.

Brian, Lorna & Owen

It was quite funny on Wednesday as I had repainted this old bench on Monday and Tuesday knowing they would probably want to film outside on Wednesday as the forecast was good (I am anticipating much more rain before the summer so hadn’t bothered to get out all the summer furn as yet).  We put a towel along the seat of it as it was a bit damp and discovered when we moved it, that the ends of it were still wet (the paint that is).  Owen had to sit forward anyway so we could all look at each other properly for the cameras but I imagine he was probably thinking ‘Bloody woman, after all this work I’ve done on her and she still paints the flipping bench at the last minute!’ but it was just as well he did as Brian and I ended up with a little white eggshell paint on our backs and thank goodness, his jacket escaped! (I have contacted the wonderful Grannymar for one of her magic solutions – dab of petrol and then wash in the usual way so here’s hoping!)

I might change my mind after I see the episode on television – although I am aware that I am bound to be mortified by the occasional ‘big bum’ etc shot I think most of it should be fine – but the whole process has been incredibly positive and I am so glad we decided to take part.  To be honest, I have got to the stage now that I don’t really care what it’s like on TV or what people think of it as I feel people will pick out what they want to, be that good, bad or indifferent, we have gained so much from it that being on TV is only a minor embarrassment! I’m spending more time with Brian on the farm, we’re all going out to feed the calves etc at the weekends, I’m playing more with the children, I’m working more productively, I’m having dedicated relaxation time, I’m giving myself rewards and as a result I’m much more contented and I’m laughing lots!  We are achieving what we set out to when we returned from England.

I feel privileged to have worked with Owen, Teresa, June and the rest of the guys that filmed etc, or should I say, to have them all work on me!  It really has made a difference, not only do i have ‘more hours’ but they are happier and of much better quality than before. Owen is an amazing guy and has promised to come and see us again (W liked him so much he spent 2 hours drawing and colouring a picture for him) and I really hope he does. 

If you are wondering exactly when it’s going to be on TV, it’s April 1st, RTE 1 at 8.30 or non-Irish readers will be able to see it on the website the day after for 21 days.  By an amazing coincidence, I found out last week that I know the lady in next week’s episode from a network I used to be in – Aisling Hurley from Teamwoodcraft so I’m really looking forward to seeing how she got on.