Hello everyone, I hope you are all well. 🙂  It’s been a while since I did a personal update and a lot has happened that affects this blog and this blogger, so I thought I’d spend today letting you know what’s up.  Febookary, the book challenge I invented has been and gone almost a month ago, so I’ll also be updating you on what happened with my Febookary challenge but first let’s deal with what’s been happeing in life.

Life

Blogging and personal life have been relatively good the last few months.  When the new year began I really felt on top of everything and excited to get reading lots of books and also looked forward to  becoming more active on this blog.  I had planned lots of different posts and still have these ideas that I want to get out, but I have struggled to write recently due to something that happened and also my health.  While the chronic pain I was feeling in my whole back, spine and ribs has gone (I still don’t know how – just put it down to a miracle!) I’ve suffered a lot of fatigue lately. 😦

My health has had all sorts of problems for some months now, the last couple of years or so taking me on a downhill path a little bit, compared to how I felt before then, but things seemed to be improving and in general I’d say I’ve been much better this new year than the last several months before.  However, I’ve unfortunately been suffereing tiredness lately, and I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in what feels like forever. 😦  I wake up tired every day and to be honest have  been napping extra when I can, as I’m so tired, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference.  I would say it’s a health problem and I’d go to the doctor for it, but the thing is, there could be another reason for all this happening.

Death

A little more than a year ago I lost my grandma when she died suddenly and I found myself so affected by it that my blogging suffered as a result.  Well, little more than a month and a half on from the one year anniversary of her death, another family member, my grandma’s sister, my great aunt has died now too. 😥  Her death wasn’t completely unexpected, she was quite old, older than my grandma and she had been diagnosed with cancer over two years ago.  But despite the cancer her health was only going down slowly, she had some stumbles so it was decided with her that she’d be better off in a care home, but only about six months after she went in, she now died.

The care home called and told us it wasn’t long, and we were on our way to go and see her, but she died before we could and that felt so sad. 😦 Though her other sister was there with her at the end, I feel bad that we didn’t get there in time.  And now we have a funeral to go to which is planned to happen very soon.  The funeral was delayed due to some problems sorting out the location and buriel plot, but it’s all sorted out now and at least with restrictions lifted we’ll be able to have a decent funeral and invite everyone who can come, unlike with my grandma’s funeral which was during lockdown and could only have a few people attending (I wasn’t able to go 😥 ).  My aunt (great aunt technically but I always called her my aunt) was a popular person in the Polish community in London so it’s going to be a big funeral and I’ll get to meet people I haven’t seen since I was small who are coming from Poland.

Unfortunately, even though I thought I was coping better than with my grandma’s death, it has still affected me and I find myself struggling to write anything new or creative recently.  I also think part of the tiredness I’m feeling is because of her death, I’m just not sleeping well and don’t want to lose another member of the family so soon, it’s all just too soon.

Febookary

My Febookary challenge (if you don’t know what that is please check it out here) went well although I wasn’t able to commit myself to reading as much as I wanted to because I overbooked myself with blog tours and promised reviews.  I did however mange to read a few comic style graphic novels, this included Sue and Tai-chan which I swear is the cutest comic about two cats, an elderly cat and a kitten, that I’ve ever read, and also What Did You Eat Yesterday?.  I did try reading one other graphic novel comic book but it was so long that I gave up, I will try again though when I’m in a better headspace. 🙂

I want to make Febookary a bigger challenge, so that more people might want to get involved.  To be honest I had planned on making more posts about reading, highlighting certain publishers and talking about reading in general, especially for this challenge, but two years in a row things have gone wrong and with so few people taking up the challenge and my own life circustances making it a hard time to do it, I don’t know what will happen next year. :/

Blog changes

I’m going to make some changes to the blog, though nothing big.  I said that Mondays and Wednesdays would be my non-book review post days, but the truth is that I’m struggling to fit certain posts within certain times.  So from now on if I have a non-book related or non-book review related post, I’ll stick it where it’s most convenient, I hope that’s ok with you? 🙂  I also want to get back into writing more non-bokish posts, and I have ideas, but I’ve just been overwhelmed with everything and am hoping things might get better after next month (the funeral is near the start of April).  So in the meantime I hope you don’t mind that this blog is still book heavy. 🙂

I previously said I wouldn’t post on the weekends, but the truth is I’ve been overwhelmed by book post recently (yes I might have requested too many and didn’t anticipate another family death 😦 ) that I don’t want to clog up all the week’s posts with book hauls, so I thought I might start posting more of these on weekends (though they will sometimes still appear on weekdays too) and using weekends in general when I feel I have too many posts and not enough time to get them out.  Besides I do still want to transfer some older reviews from my old blogs which still haven’t been moved to this one.

Social media and blogs

There’s one area of online life that I’ve really neglected even more than writing blogs and that’s with visiting them and social media.😔  I’m so annoyed with myself all the time.  I struggle being active online as it is, as most of my time is spent writing blog posts and replying to emails.  But I still managed to ocassionally check in on Instagram and Twitter and read a few blogs.  However lately, the past few weeks I just haven’t done enough of this and I feel terrible.  I’m so sorry I haven’t visited your blogs and social media messages.  I hope those reading will forgive me.  I’ll try harder to visit everyone, but it’s just going to take me some time and I don’t know but things might only get easier until after the funeral.

Go with the flow

I’m trying to be a bit more relaxed when things don’t go the way I had planned but I won’t lie, I’ve had issues with perfectionism and wanting to do and finish everything no matter how big the challenge is or how much it will overwhelm me.  I know it’s silly🙄.  Life doesn’t always go the way we planned though and just like last year I’m having to learn to cope with the loss of a loved one while still trying to blog and deal with life in the real world.  I’m not doing a brilliant job of the blog or real life at the moment, I’ve neglected visiting blogs and things in the offline world aren’t going the way I had hoped and there are quite a few stresses recently.  But I hope I can weather this storm, just like I’ve weathered similar storms before, and hopefully I’ll be back in better form in the future.

I hope you didn’t mind reading my update on what’s happening and happened in my life.  Let me know what’s been happening with you. 🙂  I hope you have a lovely day and week everyone! 🙂 ❤

Has your life gone the way you planned it recently?  Did you take part in Febookary  Let me know what you think in the comments below 🙂

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