Happy Saturday to all! A big thanks to Natalie of Natalie the Explorer for hosting WeekendCoffeeShare this and every weekend.

I have been a mess all week and by mess, I mean, I was this ginormous ball of anxiety. I had a daunting project, you see, and even though it’s all done now, my anxiety is still not going away, as if it’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.

That daunting task was upgrading the storage from a 256 GB to a 2 TB drive and a battery replacement on my 3-year-old laptop. Someone asked me, “why don’t you just buy a new laptop? It’s easier, no?”

My answer to that is, “No, it’s not easier, actually.” I would have to re-install everything. Besides, this laptop is barely used. In an average week, I probably only use about 7 – 14 hours on my personal laptop, mainly for editing photos and blogging. So it’s barely used. I don’t need another laptop, I just need to fix what’s wrong with this one.

What caused me anxiety wasn’t because I had to deal with the hardware components of the laptop, it was needing to deal with the software component like cloning a hard drive and making sure everything will run the same after. There are plenty of tutorial for the hardware removal and re-installation but very little on what needs to happen before and what will happen after. What made this anxiety worse was my brain kept playing me the worst scenarios that this could turn out awful, like computer explosion, getting electrocuted, and the computer not recognizing the new parts.

Obviously, since I’m here typing out this post on Friday night, that things went smoothly, but still, what my brain did to me and it’s doing to me is cruel. I am trying to stop it or ignore it but it’s hard and right now, it feels like a near-impossible task to do, for some reason. Maybe it’s because it’s cold outside and I don’t have much garden tasks to be focused on.

Now, let’s move on to a more cheerful topic – Garden – because as I’m writing this, my brain is still playing ominous images in my head.

After seeing some intensively planted gardens on YouTube recently, I decided to try it myself and I have to say, I’m loving how it’s turning out – a whole bed of leafy greens. Who doesn’t like that? I am trying to not prune them too much right now because with less than a month before the day length dipping below 10 hours, I want them to be as mature as possible before their growth slow to almost non-existence.

This is the berry bed. As the weather cooled and several heavy rainstorms, the strawberries have just about completely bounced back. There is still that gap in the middle of the bed, where I pulled the deceased blueberry plant a few weeks ago. Hopefully, the strawberry runners will fill in the empty gaps in this bed as I am hoping to use the strawberry plants as a living mulch situation in this bed.

You probably don’t notice but I had to completely re-do the drip irrigation system in this bed. For some unknown reason, when I was amending this bed, I found the old irrigation tubing buried several inches deep. I even found parts of it below the strawberry plants, as if the plants were riding on the tubing. How did that happen?

Finally, this is the bed along the back fence. It was my big project in September to remove the mulch, amend the soil, and plant some native perennials. Last week, I fixed the drip irrigation and now, I’m just waiting for the temperature to warm back up just a little bit so I put a thin layer of mulch on top to prevent soil erosion. After a couple of heavy rain storms, the area is looking a lot better. I’m looking forward to see what this improved soil with do next year.

Anyway, I think I’ll stop right here. I appreciate you stopping by. I hope you will have a wonderful week ahead.