A week is a long time of not writing when I’ve been blogging our lives almost daily for years. This pause has happened — not because we haven’t had sparkling adventures — but because the words haven’t come to describe them.

One of the things that I’ve learned from blogging is that either the posts are easy to type out… or I should leave it for another time. If something needs to be written down, it flows easily. If I am labouring over words, I am not in the right frame of mind to be documenting our lives.

School holidays usually means fewer outings for us. There are crowds of children in our favourite spots, and the children who live in the house are home. Our girls want to stay and play, and so I oblige by staying at home.

We are still waiting on the cabinetry to be finished in The Gifted Gypsy; perhaps at the end of this next week — I am told — and I try not to get too hopeful. We will be heading to Dancing Ground Festival on October 12, so that’ll be our test-run.

Until we can start travelling again, I am trapped in this one place — wedged between the river in which Elijah died and the cemetery in which he is buried. So I look forward to new places, new faces, relaxing with friends and life on the road again. Travelling full-time means I spend less time doing the things I don’t enjoy (like household chores) and more time doing the things I do enjoy (like adventuring with the children).

In the meantime, I keep busy with a number of different design projects for The Gifted . I am experimenting with different media of expression — wood, wool and paint. For so long I have focused only on graphic design that it’s challenging to create beauty with three-dimensional materials to which I cannot simply CTRL-Z.

Here's our stretcher-bed in place above the front seats. It's padded with self-inflating camping mattresses.

I tackled the area of David's expertise, installing new vinyl floorcoverings into the bus before the cabinets are installed.

A make-shift work-bench outside our shed is where I've been spending a lot of time lately, using power tools and breathing sawdust.

So the computer sits by itself in a corner and Aisha asks me why I’m not taking so many pictures, and the truth is that I simply didn’t feel like it this week. There must have been sparkling moments, but I let them pass us by, undocumented and soon forgotten. We’ll see what next week brings, and perhaps sometime in the future I’ll go back and fill in the gaps of last week.