I have already achieved something pretty huge along the way, and that's my garden. I won't show you a photo of what it looked like before, but it was a wild mess. Last summer I decided to do something about it, and even though it's not NOLA themed in any specific way, it did kind of evolve into something a little of the vibe. I love it with all my heart, and taking care of the ever-multiplying array of plants has done wonders for my brain. It took a lot of work, and is something I'm incredibly proud of. It's an oasis of beauty when I need it most.

I even created my own "porch" and repainted my bistro set to perfectly match the one on the front stoop of the house I rented in New Orleans for the duration of my stay. It was the best way I could think of having a piece of that beautiful place here at home with me. Okay, so the patio is a little overgrown right now, but I plan to have taken care of that by the weekend!

Day one of my journey. All this came to me whilst I was on my way to the supermarket. We're currently experiencing some blisteringly hot weather, and for a big shop, I'd generally hop the bus there and back. Instead, I decided to embrace the sweat and do the trip on foot. I'm a weirdo who loves heat and humidity (crazy for a fair-skinned redhead, I know). And boy did I sweat. And it was glorious. It also made me feel a little better about my general level of fitness at the moment. I was really taking care of myself a few months ago, but then I badly sprained my ankle and was laid up for a couple of weeks. By the time I was making feeble attempts to get back into my workout routine, I got offered a three-week cat-sitting job and seriously needed the money. But that frakked up my routine something awful and there were no more laps around the park or workout sessions for me. I'm done with the job now, and getting back out there to pound some pavement at least shut up the voice in my head which was calling me a potato, on repeat.

Got back, unpacked, threw open my back door, and cranked up my Swamp AF playlist to fill the house with blues. Then started this blog. Promised myself I wouldn't waste a bunch of time like I usually would making it all fancy. The content is the point here, not showing off design skills!

And now to bash out a few tasks to fill my day:

• I'll order some photo prints from the collection I shot whilst in NOLA. I dropped £10 on 20 photo mounts and some of those sticky photo corners. I'm going to spend an hour or two this afternoon on going through my pictures from the trip and picking 20 of the best, at which point I'll send them to Photobox, who'll print them for £0.15 a pop. Once they're here, I'll mount and hang them around the house. I've got a lot of wall art – primarily posters and cross stitches I've completed, but no photos. Seemed an obvious place to start.
• I'm gonna make some godsdamn iced tea. I HAVE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE. This might seem insane, but it's not really a thing here. I might not like it, but if I do it seems like something I should be doing whilst the weather's scorching. I won't be making it in the Deep South "so sweet that your teeth shudder" (to quote Chuck Taggart's The Gumbo Pages) style, though I may sweeten it a smidge rather than serving it totally straight.
• Then this evening it'll be jambalaya time. Now, I know how to cook a proper jambalaya from scratch, but right now I'm lacking the energy, time, and supplies to do that. So I'm doing a stripped down version using one of the Simply Cook kits which'll take me half an hour or so. And I'll make enough to fill my freezer for the week. I'll definitely thank myself for that!

My heart has never seemed to live where my body is. I grew up in Luton, UK, and pretty much wanted to be anywhere but there. Visit it sometime, you'll see what I mean. When I lived in London I wanted to be in the Scottish Highlands. But when I moved to Northampton in 2016, on the back of a dead relationship, I honestly thought for a while I'd wound up exactly where I was meant to be at that point in my life. Over the following three years that certainty got chipped away, piece by piece, until I was back to wishing my location away. In an attempt to satiate my wanderlust, I escaped to America, where I spent two weeks road-tripping from San Francisco to New Orleans, via a very circuitous route which covered Las Vegas, The Grand Canyon, Monticello, Denver, Amarillo, Dallas, Austin, and Houston.