The 5-9 is the bit of our lives that’s not our 9-5 job, what we do between 5pm when we finish work and 9am when we start again the next day. Despite the fact that I manage to maintain a travel and adventure blog with something new twice a week, I do have a 9-5 job. I don’t talk about it a lot because I like to keep a really strict, really rigid line between my “real” life and my online life but it does exist. I have a fancy title on LinkedIn but what I’d use if I was telling you is “researcher”. I’ve been here for just over eight years and I work from home. There’s a long backstory involving my previous job for how and why I work remotely and also for why I don’t work Fridays but let’s not worry about that. This is just about what I do when I’m not at work.
So I squeeze quite a lot into my weekends, evenings and my annual leave. Actually, the original title of this post included the word “overusing” my 5-9 – I hit the point last week where I was so tired that the world started spinning around me. That’s either a viral ear infection or crystals in my inner ear going in the wrong place, according to Dr Google but it tends to happen when I’m over-tired. Still, might as well be getting overtired having fun rather than rotting or doomscrolling my life away.
Firstly, I’m a Brownie and Ranger leader and they take out an evening each every week. For Brownies, I finish work at 5pm, get changed and go straight out. It’s a 20/25 minute drive to Brownies, depending on whether I get stuck behind a tractor or a driver who feels 40mph is plenty on an open road with good visibility. Brownies runs 6 – 7.30pm, then we have to tidy up, hoover etc so I never get back before 8.15pm and often later, so Brownies just sucks out an entire evening because I’m not doing anything after I get home.
Rangers finishes at 9pm and I walk because it’s close enough and it’s a lot less stressful than never ever being able to find a parking spot. It starts at 7.30 but I tend to get there between 7 and 7.15, having set off sometime just after 6.30 – not that I have anything to set up at Rangers to need to get there too early. I have time to eat after work on Ranger days, and to watch Pointless and most of House of Games before I need to get changed and leave the house, depending on how much last-minute planning and/or shopping I need to do.
Those two take up Mondays and Thursdays. Now, May is actually quite a light load. We lost a Monday to the early Bank Holiday and we would lose a second Monday to the late one but that’s the half term week so we wouldn’t meet anyway. Rangers is also very light at the moment because I have 6 girls and 5 of them are doing their GCSEs, so I haven’t seen most of them since late March (more bank holidays and school holidays throughout almost all of April anyway) and I’m not expecting them to reappear until the end of June.
Week 1
The weekend of the 2nd to 5th of May was my musical weekend. I went and indulged my inner teenager at a local music festival on the Friday, in a bejewelled denim cowboy hat, ate a cheese-filled crepe, drank a pineapple-flavoured slushie and learned that slushies contain some kind of antifreeze that may or may not be potentially fatal to small children and will probably never touch one again. I danced, I sang, I was the only person in the audience who knew my favourite band’s new songs (I spent the week listening to the new EP on repeat and have therefore irreversibly broken this year’s Spotify Unwrapped) and I got hit on the head many times by oversized balloons. Saturday was my sister’s birthday and we had a family barbecue and then on Sunday, I went off to London to see Die Walküre, the second and longest part of Wagner’s Ring Cycle – five and a half hours of opera! Monday was the bank holiday, so I got up a little later than I normally would on a Monday, walked from Kingsway to Waterloo, had breakfast in the Wetherspoons underneath the west London platforms, came home and probably did very little for the rest of the day. No Rangers today, because it’s a bank holiday!
On Tuesday evening, we had a planning meeting for the overnight indoor camp we’re doing for Brownies next month. It was at the Brownie hall, so a 20/25 minute drive but not until 7pm. This was a bit of an unusual day – normally I’ve got a 2km/28 minute walk which has to be squeezed in somewhere but those of us who live out in the sticks met up that day to sign a card for our boss’s special birthday, so I did most of my walk at lunchtime meeting my nearest colleague, did a quick walk round the block after work to get in the last few metres and then went to the planning meeting early to meet a second colleague in the supermarket car park to sign the card. As for the meeting, we planned our activities and menu for the camp and what else we needed to add to the shopping list and what we needed to bring from the hall, which included going through the first aid box to check what we had and whether it was in date.
I apparently had a night off on Wednesday – Wednesdays, statistically, are most likely to be evenings off. I don’t remember what I did but undoubtedly rushed out to get my walk over and done with, possibly after sitting at my desk for an extra hour to do some blogging and then I would have had a bath.
We already know about Thursdays – that’s Brownies and it occupies the entire evening. We did a Communicate Stage 3 Skills Builder badge activity from the Express Yourself theme which involved the Nato phonetic alphabet and then one of the Brownies brought in an activity she wanted to run for her Brownie Gold Award challenge, so we threw away the Unit Meeting Activity we had planned and did her activity instead. We handed out a Gold Award, but not to this particular girl – it was for a girl who’s just left for Brownies, who came back for one week after Easter to show that she’d completed her last interest badge and then came back this week because her mum was our parent helper (little sister is still with us) and to be presented with her Gold Award, which we didn’t have in stock two weeks ago, she having told us before Easter that she had no interest in that last badge.
On Friday I was going camping, so the morning was spent packing my stuff, running down to town for a postcard for some Rebel admin, posting the card to the London colleagues and getting the food for camp. I left camp on Saturday afternoon after a combination of forgetting a broken tent pole and a breeze nearly destroyed the tent and then spend Sunday more or less as an exhausted ghost. I did find time to go to two supermarkets for coconuts for a Ranger craft.
Week 2
Monday was making coconut bowls with my one non-GCSE Ranger – it’s a craft she’s wanted to do for over a year and was doing her own GCSEs the night we did it last year. Tuesday was Trefoil – that’s the Trefoil Guild, Guiding for adults (or WI for retired Guide leaders) and we were doing some flower arranging, not to stereotype the Trefoil for its age demographic. In August we’re doing a barbecue and in September, we’re having a visit from the police dogs! Tuesday was another chaotic night – I had an hour and a half to do a 28-minute walk, a trip to Tesco for flowers (and foliage – what kind of foliage do we need and can I just buy it??) and have time to eat and get changed. That was the evening the dizziness started. Wednesday was another free night and I really did just do my walk and fall into a bath that night, watching the tiles spin around me. Thursday was Brownies and we did another Skills Builder activity, this one about public speaking, as well as the UMA we didn’t do last week. The girl who did her Gold challenge activity last week finished up her Skills Builder badge this week and therefore officially completed and was awarded her Gold Award.
At the weekend, I made a pair of shorts out of a towel for after kayaking (they’re not great but I bet they’re better than any shorts you’ve ever made!), filled in and sent off part two of the Residential Event Notification form for our indoor camp to our district commissioner (admin is ludicrous; you have to do all your risk assessments and provisional plans and send them off for approval 12 whole weeks before an overnight and then do it again four weeks before!) and went to see a play on Friday. On Saturday we had a Girlguiding county leaders watersports day, which was actually two and a half hours but good fun – a little SUP, a little kayaking, a little being proud that the smallest division in the entire country had represented 75% of the leaders who turned up (4 in total, 3 from my division). I came home from that damp but reasonably satisfied, the dizziness finally wearing off and decided I was going to go to the spa at Centerparcs on Sunday evening and just lie in hot water or in the sauna and switch my brain off and hopefully I’d come back finally feeling recovered from my one night at camp over a week ago.
Week 3
Today is Monday and I’m going to the boathouse, since one Ranger and I can’t meet one-on-one every week for a month and a half. Our regular instructor can’t make Mondays and so we have an outside instructor tonight. We’re also going to be missing our manager and the only two regular volunteers are the manager’s son (obviously not really a member of Girlguiding although he’s a boathouse stalwart and a regular helper with his wife’s Brownies) and our newest helper who’s a unit helper rather than a full-time leader and also only on her second session with the boathouse, so I’m taking it upon myself to go as the sole representative of actual Girlguiding full member. It’s a unit session with one of our regular units, so I’m expecting the older girls to have an idea of what they’re doing and for the ones who’ve come up from Brownies in the last year to need a little more attention.
Tomorrow I’m going to see the last Mission Impossible film – this is my favourite film franchise and the only one I’ll make the effort to see in the cinema, especially now that my nearest (a 40 minute drive in good traffic) has closed. I’ll be heading straight out after work and I don’t expect to get home until nearly 11pm. Wednesday is another night off and I’ve got Thursday’s blog to write so I daresay I’ll sit at my desk after work until that’s done. On Thursday we’re back at Brownies and I’m running two messy “it’s not magic but science” Unit Meeting Activities, both for the Skills For My Future theme. If she turns up and does both the activities, that means a third girl in three weeks finishing her Gold Award! Then we’ve got the camp meeting for the parents, where we give out and hopefully collect in consent forms and health forms, talk them through the kit list and answer any other questions they have, so I won’t be home from Brownies until at least 9pm.
I’m spending the weekend in London. If Mission Impossible 8 is good, I’ll go and see it again, this time at the IMAX at Waterloo on Friday. I’ll pop into the Girlguiding shop for new volunteer Adventure badges and then on Saturday, I’m playing Monopoly across London with the Rebel Badge Club (kind of like Girlguiding for adults, in that we get to do badges and have fun and there are no children involved!). I’m staying over in London and going home Sunday, with no real plans. It depends how tired I am and how tired my feet are and what else I fancy doing. I’d like to go to the Olympic pool but they say it’s closed for a lot of May, so I’ll need to check whether that applies to Sunday. If it’s likely to be open, I’ll do an hour or so there before heading back, no doubt by Clipper boat.
Week 4
Monday is a bank holiday and I have no real plans for it. Then it’s half term, so no Brownies or Rangers. I’d hoped to just have a lazy weekend but the aforementioned boathouse volunteer is running archery for his wife’s Brownies at our local campsite in June and as I’ve used the kit before, I’m meeting him there on Wednesday to show him what we’ve got and how the range is laid out. I might go swimming on Tuesday – my local pool does 90 minute sessions on Tuesday evenings rather than the usual 60. I might also get round to taking the SUP down to the sea at some point, maybe on Monday. This looks like quite a quiet week at the moment but I know what my weeks tend to be like and I guarantee I’ll have filled at least three of my four empty evenings by the time next week rolls around.
And the last weekend, on Friday I’m going glamping in Devon. I need to pack light because it’s 200m from the car park to the accommodation and you get transferred by quad bike and trailer. Last time I glamped, which was admittedly in November, it took three trips with the wheelbarrow to get my stuff down from the car park, which is probably a similar distance away, although it’s a very different place. No doubt I’ll do the bare minimum walking on Friday and Saturday to get my daily 2km and spend the majority of the time standing next to the hot tub which I will inevitably have overheated. I’ve learned that it takes eight to ten logs to heat a hot tub and you can either put them in one at a time and spend three hours on it, or you can wedge four or five in at a time and get it overheated within fifty minutes. By the time I leave on Sunday morning, we’ll be into June but my first job in June will be to pack up and come home so it doesn’t count.
June is going to be a marginally more chaotic month – as well as our Brownie overnight, I think I’m going to a full-on weekend Guide camp. My local outdoor pool should be open so any spare evenings will be there, I’ve got a mentor check-in at Guides for my mentee (should be the last one and after this she’ll get signed off and given her badge and certificate!), I’ve got two long and exhausting days of Paddlesport Leader training, plus two Friday night boathouse evenings and I think I get to go to actual boat club instead of Brownies one evening. Yes, June would probably have been a better month to look at the 5-9.
How do I keep track of it all?
I watch a lot of Hannah Witton’s videos – not the stuff about being a mum but the organisational stuff and on her recommendation, I have everything colour-coded in my Google Calendar, complete with times, so I can just look at it each week and see exactly what’s coming up. I admit, my Girlguiding calendar contains things I’m not doing, like all the Trefoil events but I know what my eye’s allowed to skim over.
Obviously, my real calendar has a lot more detail. I’ve wiped a lot of it out for public display. But it gives a flavour of what my calendar looks like and how I organise it. Red is for holidays & travel but also for Trefoil stuff, although Trefoil stuff is in my Girlguiding calendar, so I can switch both reds on and off as I wish. Yellow is for anything Brownie-related or for anything relating to that district. Purple is for Rangers but purple is also for generally me stuff – again with the separate Girlguiding calendar. Dark green is for boathouse and the single light blue dot is Guides and it’s just something to note about the Guides who meet at the same time as my Rangers – in this case, a missing leader that week. Dark blue, as in the 17th, is for general Girlguiding stuff that doesn’t directly relate either to Rangers, Brownie or the boathouse. The “Trefoil event” on the 1st is for an unknown event taking place at some point in May which I saw fit to put in despite literally knowing nothing about it. Next month, you’d see swimming in an icky snot-green and a lot more Guiding navy.
This is what a week looks like – see, this is how I block it all out. I do have a separate work calendar but since this is the 5-9 and not the 9-5, I’ve got it switched off at the moment.
I Am A Polar Bear 