tune off and drop out

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I just dropped out of a Zen sesshin that was supposed to run over four days, starting tomorrow evening, at the last second. There are several reasons for this:
- I am still very tired - I need time and space to veg out
- I have a lot to do (i.e. my taxes and a presentation for Monday and a lecture to prepare for Wednesday), and I can't cram that into Monday morning and Wednesday afternoon. I wanted to do the taxes last Saturday, but I was just ... too tired.
- The Youth Hostel where the sesshin is held is potentially not very warm
- Even though there's only 4-5 hours of sitting meditation over the course of each day, I'll be stiff and it will be hard to maintain my concentration. It certainly won't be as restful as a calm weekend at home.

I know that I potentially took a place somebody else might have wanted. I do feel a little guilty, especially because this is more or less my last chance at a sesshin for quite a while. Anyway, I'll pay full price for something I didn't do, so at least I'm not cheating them out of money.

flat renovation news

So, my husband is getting two weeks time off in February, and one week next week, starting on Friday. I'm hoping to put in an order for the sound insulation this evening / tomorrow morning, so that we can get the materials asap and this means we'll hopefully have our bedroom sorted by the end of February! If they take a month to deliver, I'll KILL them.

In the mean time, during the first week he's off, we'll tackle the kitchen. Basically, we need to take down the kitchen units, put up another row of tiles, and then remount the kitchen units on top of the new line of tiles after having stripped the wallpaper off and repainted the wall. Our kitchen is tiny, so that shouldn't take long at all. I anticipate that the worst jobs will be the tiling and taking the units down/putting them back up. For those of you who've been to our flat, the units near the fridge go down first, then the units over the sink.

Looking forward to a week on takeaways until that is finished ;)