Distractable? MOI?!

Day 3 of the career break, and I'm still not quite used to the whole thing. For now, I'm busying myself with tidying up the house. It's actually ridiculous how out of hand we let everything get before pulling it back in order, courtesy of the "But we work far away from home!" excuse, and I find it difficult to concentrate in a chronically untidy space.

Plus, if things aren't all neat and tidy there are a million and one potential working-from-home distractions to add to the pull of the telly, which are harder to ignore if the place is topsy turvy. Like, "Ah sure while I'm here I might as well just do a hoover/a wash/a bit of painting/pop out and mow the lawn/do a spot of rewiring before I do this worky thing."

Dangerous.

Especially since I'd have to go look up Dad's handyman's bible to even see how to wire a plug.

The sitting room is all but sorted, and I can now see the dining room table again having loaded up a couple of bags with paper rubbish for the recycling bin. I'd nearly forgotten what it looked like. On my tea break, I decided to sort through some make-up for review over on Beaut.ie (yep, tough life) and do my nails (all in the name of research, of course)... and then I got properly distracted by the absolutely gorgeous colours in the back garden.

We have two crab apple trees in the bottom corners of the garden that are currently doing their damndest to display every autumnal hue imaginable. There are a few die-hard green leaves and a couple of already denuded branches, granted, but for the most part they're riots of crisp yellows and golds and russets and oranges, laden down with the cutest mini apples.

So out came my inner Mary "How Do You Do?" FitzGerald to try and bring some of that palette inside and crack on with a bit of make and do in honour of Oíche Shamhna (Irish for Halloween).

Do you remember it now?

Sadly, I didn't have any cardboard innards of toilet rolls or twine or safety scissors lying about, so I took my life in my hands and took a grown-up scissors to a black page out of a magazine for a couple of tasteful bats.

Bert (left) and Ernie (right). Yes, I have christened the paper cut-out bats.

No sharp implements required for an M&S hurricane vase holding leaves from the trees in the carpark and Himself's Japanese maple and a crop of the aforementioned crab apples. The fact that the label on our Monart candle coordinates nicely with this autumnal vignette is an ironic coincidence: it's called "Summertime"!

Yesterday evening, I took a mad notion to get a pumpkin, so it was off to Superquinn in Portlaoise for one of their €2 offerings. I'd intended to carve it up to make a creepy jack o' lantern, but after I'd cleaned it up I stuck it on the hearth out of the way while I was doing dinner...

... and I like it au natural.

I suspect this is not normal.


Footnote: While reacquainting myself with Samhain lore by way of Google, I came across a sentence that kicked off with the classic phrase "Some people think Americans started Halloween..."

Er, indeed.