Thoughts like wild geese

I'm still not feeling great, but I think I'm just going to have to accept that this week is a write-off in terms of mental health. It's been bucketing down with rain here for pretty much all of October (although weirdly this week the only time it hasn't been raining has been the early hours of the morning when Matthias and I go out running), and I think the lack of access to green space (beyond ... running through it briefly) is starting to get to me. It makes me feel tense and on edge.

In better news, however, our decluttering has been a roaring success. We have now got rid of every single item that we wanted to give away:

An electronics recycling company came and collected all our old laptops/routers/cables/chargers on Friday. Best of all, they did this for free.

One of my work colleagues took an old CD player that we weren't using.

A PhD student in my former department took my Modern Irish textbooks/grammar books.

Another PhD student took some of Matthias's old linguistics books (although not the whole lot).

A charity took a huge bagful of old winter coats and lighter jackets (these are still fine, we've just replaced most of them).

People on Freecycle took our old outdoor table, a spare mortar and pestle (for some reason we had two), some bags of potting mix, and an old vacuum cleaner.

It feels as if a weight has been lifted from my shoulders.