My day begins at 6. I wake up and check my email first thing in the morning. Flag what needs to be done for the day and do a mental check of who needs to be where. Its Wednesday, my longest working day of the week and with everyone needing to get out of the house before 8:30, I brace myself for a hectic morning. At 6:30, I am up and out of bed. Kevin takes the children who are awake for breakfast and coffee making duties while I take the dog out to let the chickens out. I see that Blackie, our Black Roc chicken, has laid an egg from the roost again, so I sort out a bit more padding underneath her bed for tomorrow - hoping to avoid another broken egg. Chickens get fresh feed and water and the dog and I head into the house.
Mornings are always a blur - endless rounds of toast, "don't forget your XYZ" and persuading a toddler to wear anything finally stop at 8:25 when Kevin heads down the road to drop Ellis off at the bus. I spend the next 20 or so minutes doing breakfast dishes and painting the dining room table, then I gather my things and head to the studio for the day.
My morning is filled with finalising the schedules and printing for Blogtacular. With just over 2 weeks to go until the big day, Kat and I are in frequent contact. My work is largely behind the scenes- sorting out printing, volunteers, catering and accounts. With the last speaker announcement and the schedule going up today, it seems all the more real.
At about 10:30, I head to the house for a quick smoothie break and to collect the eggs for the day. We have 5 by 10:30 and a couple more hens looking like they were ready to do their business. Of our 8 hens, we usually get 6 eggs a day.
At 11, I have a phone call with my new webdesigner. I have made the decision to move Slugs over to Squarespace and need someone to do the heavy lifting. We chat about what I want to the space to be and how best to consolidate my various areas of work virtually.
Noon - Aware that I have a couple of small deadlines to meet in the coming week, I take a break from computer work to take some photos. I am still in the process of cutting down a lot of the work that I do, but have taken a couple of small-ish jobs to tide us over. Not feeling very inspired today, I take the bare minimum I need to get on with the deadline and head to the house to make lunch.
1pm - Over lunch of salad and Kat's Butternut Squash Soup, I start pulling together an inspiration board for the new site and proceed to get sucked into Pinterest for a wee while. Fortunately, my need for coffee outweighs my need to pin all the things and I head back to the house for an afternoon top up.
2pm - After a bit of photo editing, I am finally able to publish a blog post I wrote over a week ago. I just can't seem to get everything done these days.
3pm - I always start getting twitchy at about 3, knowing that I need to leave in about half an hour to cycle to the bus stop to collect Ellis off the bus.
4:15pm- after a broken chain in the rain, Ellis and I arrive home to change and have a hot drink, then its back to the studio. Our internet deteriorates after about 4pm, so I always try to spend some time offline making things to ease my frustration.
5:30pm- With our stomachs rumbling, I head to the kitchen to cook. Its pasta and wild garlic pesto for him, chicken salad for me. I make a large pot of pasta to greet the little ones and Kevin when they get home from Tae Kwan Do - they are always very grumpy and hungry when they arrive back and its good to have something to thrust in their hands when they walk in the door. Ellis and I decide to watch Fantastic Mr Fox after dinner.
7pm- The little ones arrive home, sound asleep. They go straight to their beds and I head back over to the studio. We are on a deadline for the printing and I continue to work on these straight through the first half of the Blogtacular twitter chat.
9:30pm - Finished with the schedules, I join in the chat talking about online friendships going offline. When the chat is over, Kat and I have a quick catch up, review the printing and I finalise the exports.
11:30pm - Finally, I am in bed when a pattern support query comes in. I debate about answering, but get up and run downstairs to forward my standard "reading patterns" email.
12:00pm - In bed!