Getting over feeling "bleh"

Lately, I’ve found myself becoming, I don’t want to say bored, but I suppose un-enamoured with daily life. Perhaps that isn’t the right way to phrase it, but I guess what I mean is it just feels like each day is pretty similar. I wake up, generally go straight into either teaching lessons or editing, and carry on with that through the afternoon. Then, usually either go on a beach walk or do yoga. Then, sleep, and repeat. This is obviously the usual for most people: work, carry on, repeat, with the weekends as the breaks. Since I work from home on my own schedule, I have made my ‘weekend’ Sunday and Monday, and, while we often do fun things on those days, I can’t shake the feeling of just being kind of ‘bleh’. I was looking back on my old blog posts and thought that maybe it had something to do with a lack of organized training or activities. Up until living in Mozambique, I have always been in training for something: soccer practices working up to games, running working up to a half marathon, riding working up to an endurance ride, even schooling working up to the next school holiday. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that I am no longer in training for something in particular that is making me feel this way or if it is just the normal kind of November feeling - it seems that nothing much happens in November, and it being low tourist season that is especially true in this tourist town - but I’ve decided to do a little recap of the past few weekends to remind myself that in fact quite a lot goes on.

For starters, we took a trip on our friends’ boat to one of the islands, “Death Island”. This is actually a sand bank that appears at low tide and disappears at high tide, and got its name because, in the old days, prisoners used to be left at low tide to drown at high tide, when the island disappears under water. So, on a Sunday afternoon, we set out to sea and had a wonderful time in the hot summer weather.

Here we are swimming out to the island - four of us ventured out and our other friend took photos from the boat to use for advertising, as it is a catamaran which people can rent out.

This involved occasionally hilarious expressions as we tried to interpret the arm motions and figure out the poses we were being asked to do.

And, of course, the quintessential failed jump photos.

My personal favorite of the out-takes.

Some classic beach walking photos.

A good glass of champagne on the boat made the trip even more fun.

Lounging.

The next weekend, we set out again, this time to the Govuru River where Jay does his canoe safaris. We spent the day swimming and had a braai, or bbq, with fresh lamb chops from our friends’ farm.

Having a braai at the river.

We had to get creative with the braai as we had nothing to raise the grid above the fire.

So, all in all, life has been, if a bit slow, overall quite good.

In the midst of it all, Mandy got two new kittens: Dixie and Dorky.

Here is the little spotted eagle owl chick, growing up into what is called a brancher, as he sits on the branch and cries out for food.

And, meanwhile, my little rat-tail cactus is thriving!