Shades of White

"Just One" Housekeeping

"Let's see. I'll start in the sun porch. Hm. What needs attention the most? The bay window. Ugh. I'll sort the schoolwork baskets and dust the bay.

Now the kitchen. Just one...let's see. It's the floor that gets the attention today. These shoes need to go. This box of "needs to go downstairs" needs to go downstairs. Shake the rug and fetch a new one for under the sink.  Sweep and wipe up the spots. Much better!

Living/dining...the mail basket. Sort, toss, pile the things that need my attention. Dust under the basket.

Front porch..."

One thing. Just one. Choose that which needs to be done the most in each room and do it and then move to the next room. In my puzzling and complaining to God about my piles of to-do, it occurred to me that I needed to re-think how I was doing my day-to-day housekeeping. Laundry is done everyday. Meals, too. But the cleaning up of the messes around the house kept me struggling. I've been amazed at how much nicer my home looks since I've started doing my Just One.

Now the struggle is to continue to do it several days a week. I think, though, I like the results enough that I am energized to keep at it. Even the closets are getting cleaned out!

Enjoy the day!

Autumn Snow

This:

 

Plus this:

 

Equals:

 

If you stop by, I'll brew a pot of Chai tea; we'll sit in front of the fire and watch the donkey and cattle go by the bay window, and we will let the kitties in to warm their toes.

And the Cat Went Poof

I did not grab my camera fast enough and missed a great photo opportunity. When I looked out the window yesterday morning, Orion (the big, black, fluffy cat in the lower left) was heading out to hunt in the field across the stream when a calf (top right) spied him and decided it was worth a frolicking look at the intruder. Across the stream trotted the bovine; across the stream, in the opposite direction, fled the very large, poofy-tailed cat.

Today and tomorrow I do not have school, and the family is busy with other activities. I have two days to put my house in order and do a few necessary tasks. When those are done, I get to decide how to spend my time.

One activity will be to evaluate our food supplies for the winter. I have plenty of wheat berries, and I just purchased a 50 lb. bag of rolled oats. I need to sort through the canned goods and see what I need there. I pulled up my list from last year on my computer this morning, and I'm going to go through and make some changes and then figure out what I want to purchase.

I'd also like to find someone who sells non-hybridized seed so that I can go back to saving seed from my garden. Anyone have a suggestion for a good vendor?

Off and running! Have a great day!

The Cave Under the Swamp

"Aren't you going to tell us???? What was it?????" she asks. (from the comment box for the last post)

Ah! To be certain, it was some modern-aged Gendel and his mother...it was, no doubt, the cave under the swamp.

It was a black and fur-lined den, full of webs--like the lint I pull from my dryer--only damp and tenacious, sticking to the tank like stain on wood.

The home of beasts!

I, Beowulfina, fighting valiantly and courageously, killed the menace!

However, unlike the great warrior of old, I exercised restraint and did not display the head for all to see and simply allowed the members of the family to go on using their Heorot cheerfully, without their knowing how dangerous a place they had been residing--and how the evil hand could have reached out and grabbed them unaware while sitting there...

No one within my home is missing. I, more valiant than Beowulf, did not allow a single member of my hall to fall before such wicked beasts!

There are, no doubt, dragons ahead for me to slay. Surely the upper level of my great home, with nests like wasps and flying, winged beasts, will be the next great battle ground. And then, some day, I may be buried in the barrow by my telescope.

(My daughter thinks I've finally lost it completely.)

Slaying the Beast

A whip and a chair, a spray bottle of bleach, a long stick with a rag wrapped around it, several more rags, a vacuum cleaner, a magic eraser, and a facial mask for hazardous materials were all that were needed to pull the beast out and slay it.

The old toilet tank was flat against the wall; the new one sits just slightly away from the wall, which is not noticeable until you pull the top off and investigate more carefully (and who in her right mind carefully investigates that?).

Do you know what type of animal can hide there when it has been ignored?

Have you hugged your toilet today?

Yesterday Was Friday

The sun is rising later now, and when I wake in the pre-dawn morning, I go to the window and look out upon the winter constellations rising in the east. I like to start the day by curling up in my big green chair with a blanket and a cat and a book to read--right now I'm reading Elisabeth Elliot's A Slow and Certain Light (a book one can read slowly and still take enough away each day to ponder) and Leviticus (certainly not the most action-packed book of the Bible). Yesterday India Ink did the honors.

After breakfast, I headed outside to talk to my turkeys. My son usually moves the cage for me so that they have fresh, clean grass each day. I feed them. The toms are finally looking seriously tom-ish.

 

As I walked back towards the house, I walked past the raspberry patch and realized I had not picked them the day before. I found an ice cream pail and waded through prickly vines.

I had plenty of help.

Although my clothes line is threatening to pull its cement moorings out of the ground (either that or fall apart from rust), I still hang out the towels and jeans as often as the weather allows. My clothes pin bag use to be my mom's. I don't know if she made this one or not, but she always made them just like this one--cute little-girl dresses.

The rest of the day I worked around the house, washing out kitchen cupboards and wiping them with Orange Glow--and tossing as many items as I thought I could live without. I worked on adding assignments to Homeschool Tracker--I'm running out of time to get this done since school starts on Tuesday! I ended the day with a trip to the grocery store, which made me decide that it is time go back to more home made cooking; the bill was nasty!

Today? More of the same--although I'm going to start by sorting the mail piles and paying bills. (Not so poetic as hanging out laundry and picking berries, though.)

Have a wonderful day!

Early Morning Bask

Weekends--a mixture of business and rest: 4-H, family reunions, teen parties, star parties, Sunday afternoon naps.

But the weekend is over and the week is here.

We need to make jam, jello and pies from the cherries, mulberries, and black caps we've been picking. My cherry bushes have been loaded with Nanking Cherries--those little cherries that take an hour to pit out four cups for one pie. I had the boys help. I used a recipe that my mother-in-law gave me; I have no idea where it originated. It can be used for any fruit pie you'd like to try, and an uncooked, refrigerated fruit pie seems especially good in the heat of the summer:

Fresh Fruit Pie
Stir and pat these ingredients into a pie tin:
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup oil
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons milk
salt (I always love it when it just says salt. I add a couple of shakes with the salt shaker and make it do. I suppose this is comparable to the "pinch of salt" in the old cookbooks.)

Bake at 400 degrees for 10 minutes. Allow to cool.

Slice fruit into cooled crust (peaches, cherries, strawberries, berries...)--it takes something close to 4 cups for a 9", 3 cups for an 8".

Stir together:
1 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
Add 1 cup water and cook until thick; remove from heat. Stir in 3 tablespoons of Jello (the powder) that matches the fruit. Cool and then poor this mixture over the fruit in the pie tin. Refrigerate until set.

Enjoy :).

The garden needs hoeing, I need to pay the bills, I have letters to write and trips to make.

Sometimes I long for the lazy days of summer that I had as a kid.

While picking cherries the other day, I realized that I probably still have them in many ways; how many people get to pick cherries for an hour, listening to the birds, smelling the fresh mowed lawn, watching the donkey protect her herd nearby?

Go in search of beauty in the world that surrounds you...

Summer Project #1

Today Jacob and I stained the deck. Since I stained it last year, I chose just to do a quick covering of the top surfaces. First we swept and cleaned.

The boardwalk that connects our two decks has three different levels, and some people have tripped on them, not seeing that there was a step. I chose to use a solid colored stain on the last board of each step.

I noticed that the boards under the step look tacky--I'm hoping that when the deck is thoroughly dry, we will not see the old vs. new stain as much. If we do, I'll have to break out the can of stain and do some touch-up.

One project DONE!

Beautiful Wisconsin

Click on photo to enlarge

Summer Plans

Now that school is done for the year (except for one son's final English paper), I have plans to keep me busy all summer long. I've a to-do list as long as my arm.

My goal is to make my house a bit less cluttered and a lot more restful and beautiful.

I don't have a lot of money to spend, but usually when I find pictures of rooms that attract me, it is not the new, sleek homes that I linger over. Rather, I find myself attracted to the older homes that are polished and roomy.

Room by room. Maybe I'll show you what I do as the summer goes by.

The Life of a Mommy

I love you mommy


Mommy, will you wash me?


MOMMY?


What are you doing, mommy? Where are you going? Can I go, too?


Um, mommy! Wait for me. I'll only be a minute...


I'll go ahead of you. It's fun to be 1st. And where did you say we were going?

Motherhood:
The state in which nothing ever gets done
without interruption.

"O.K. Paper...pencil...'Straighten house, feed turkeys, practice 1:00'..."

"What's for breakfast?"

"Would you prefer hot cereal this morning?"

"Yeah."

"Would you put 4 cups of water on to boil?"

"Yeah."

"'Practice 1:00, feed turkeys'..."

"Have my jeans been washed?"

"I've washed a load of jeans every day of my life for the last several years."

"I put it into the laundry yesterday afternoon."

"What's so important about that specific pair?"

"It's the only pair that still fits!"

"We were at Wal-Mart yesterday. Why didn't you buy jeans?"

"I didn't think about it!"

"Put it on your shopping list. You do have a shopping list, don't you?"

"Yeah...but what about my jeans? I'm leaving at 10:30."

"Put them on top of the washing machine, and I'll wash that load first. I thought your practice was this afternoon."

"They decided to move it to the morning because several of the kids couldn't be there this afternoon."

"Practice 1:00 10:30, plan meals..."

"What's for breakfast?"

"Hot cereal. Is the water boiling? If so, would you stir a cup of corn grits into it--don't forget to add the salt. Do you work today?"

"From noon until 8:00."

"The practice got moved to this morning, and I'm not going to be able to take you at noon--would  it be O.K. if I were to drop you off at the library when we go into town at 10:30?"

"If I'm going to be ready to go, I'll need to get my uniform washed up."

"Wait! I told your brother I'd wash his jeans this morning. Why did you wait until now to wash your uniform?

"I thought I'd have time to do it this morning! My uniform is dark enough--I'll throw them in together."

"Good. Thanks. O.K...meal planning. I think I have 2 lbs. of hamburger and a package of chicken thawing in the refrigerator...but it looks like we are going to need to eat on the road. What do I have for sandwiches?"

....

If you ever talk to a mother and you wonder why she has trouble telling you something, it may be that she simply has forgotten the art of keeping a complete thought in her head from start to finish.

Or, perhaps, she is simply listening to the silence around her...savoring the moment.

When my sister was delivering her 4th baby (the oldest just turning 5), one of the nurses asked her what she "did", so Sis told her she was a stay-at-home mom. The nurse said she was not sure she could sit home all day long with her kids--but then she reasoned, "I bet your cupboards are clean!" 

Yeah.

Right.

I wonder how she managed a degree in nursing...

Living Purposefully

 

       ~~As a stay at home mom, my time is my own.

No one tells me to get tasks done on time--unless you count the question, "When is supper?"

If I do not start school on time, no one docks my pay.

If I sit at the computer all day, no one but my children notice.

        ~~At times I feel the burden of the "to do list".

A voice in my head says, "Hurry! You are behind! You need to get this done, and this, and this."

Other times the voice is muffled as I follow a rabbit trail of thoughts.

        ~~Neither the scurry of chores nor the joy of casting off cares is "Holy unto God", in and of itself.

It is our offering up of each moment of our life that makes our actions blessed.

It is in living our life, doing our tasks, and speaking our words to the Glory of God that we find peace.

        ~~Contemplatively choosing how to spend my time as I joyfully seek the Face of God--that is what I desire.

Is there more to life than this?

The Twice Pinched Penny

This is the road that goes past our farm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Use it up,
Wear it out,
Make it do,
Or do without.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

        ~~My mother and my grandmother were known for their ability to pinch the penny twice.

Nothing was purchased unless there was no other option. 

I am not as careful at penny pinching as they, but I do enjoy trying to figure out how to make do with what we have.

        ~~I use to make a menu for the week, but too often I would discover leftovers and partially used containers of food going bad in my refrigerator.

One of the ways I have learned to save money is to be certain that the food in the refrigerator is used up each day.

I start by making a list of meals that we will eat over the next several days, without specifying which day we will eat them.

I always have a couple of items from the freezer thawing in the refrigerator so that we can make something from that list of meals when we need to.

Then each morning, as I begin to plan the day, I look at the list of suggested meals and open the refrigerator to look over what I have there.

Sometimes there is enough for us to make a meal out of the leftovers, which is great for lunchtime so the children can come to the kitchen and heat something up whenever they are ready to eat; I just pull the containers out and set them on the counter so that they know what the choices are.

Other times, I get creative and come up with a meal plan that fits what is in the refrigerator.

If there is nothing to use, I go back to the menu.

        ~~This week I noticed that I had some cooked hamburger and the remainder of a can of tomato sauce in the frig left from the stuffed peppers I had made the day before; I had made fewer peppers than planned because only my daughter and I had eaten them.

So I decided I would make chili to use up those ingredients.

I put the hamburger and tomato sauce into a large pot and then added more tomatoes, chili beans, and chili pepper; I also added the remainder of the hamburger-tomato-wild rice mixture that had not been used in peppers...and warned the family that those few "black things" floating in their soup was wild rice and not some unknown entity.

No one complained--they said the chili was good!

        ~~If the menu calls for green beans, but there is a head of lettuce that needs to be used up, and if it would go well with the meal, then I make the switch.

If I plan to make soup, and leftover broth can be added, then it does not go to waste; tonight I am going to poach some fish in a cup of white wine and sliced onion, along with the beef broth left over from our last roast.

Sometimes I find two or three different kinds of fruit left over from past meals--not enough of any one of them for a the whole family.

That is when I pull out enough bowls for each person eating, and I begin to fill each dish with a serving of fruit; when the family comes to eat, each can choose a bowl--first come first serve, in case anyone complains.

        ~~As long as I always remember to open the refrigerator door and rummage through the containers to find something we can use, I do not have food spoiling and being wasted. It is a penny pinched twice.

This Morning

Moonset

My calendar says that yesterday was full moon. A full moon washes out the sky so that it is not the best time to star gaze. It isn't even the best time to moon gaze since one normally watches the terminator (the line where the dark and light meet) as it moves across the mountains, craters, ridges, and valleys, giving a 3-D perspective.

Even so, it doesn't matter if the moon takes center stage for a few days each month--for generations upon generations, its beauty and lore have captivated our hearts.

Today I plan to continue spring cleaning. The laundry room needs to be finished--curtains washed, shelves wiped down, the floor waxed. I want to do as much as I can before the nice weather comes, for I will want to paint a few walls and work outside then.

And to think--the sun is shining and no more snow is in the forecast until Monday!

Look for beauty--
Jean

Stoking the Wood Stove

I know that I have mentioned that I stoke our wood stove several times a day in my blog.

I thought I'd share what that involves--for those of you who do not have your own green goddess.

1st I rake the ash through the grate of the fire box.

Then I move the kitties out of the way and open the ash drawer.

I pull the pan out and empty it into the ash can behind the house.

After returning the pan and closing the ash drawer, I add wood to the fire box.

My boys bring wood into the house and refill my wood box twice a day for me.

I wait for the temperature of the stove top to rise to 450 degrees.

Our family rule is that the timer must be set and cannot be turned off until the stove has been turned down--no one wants to over-fire the stove!

When the stove is hot enough, we turn the air flow down, and we turn the catalytic converter on.

And then our little green goddess does her job for a few more hours!

Reaching the Goal

If you aim at nothing, you'll hit it every time. ~Author unknown

The problem:
How do you organize your life? How do you remember what needs to be done? Do you have a "to do" list? A calendar?

Goal: To put order into my life

Over time, I've put together a method that works for me--as much as possible. I use a calendar, an Excel spreadsheet,and a couple of notebooks.

The calendar hangs in my kitchen and everyone is required to put activities on it so that we can plan who gets the car and work out any other conflicts.

The Excel spreadsheet has a list of activities that I try to do daily and weekly. I have the day's activities organized according to the order I do them--as much as I can, followed by the weekly activities that I do if I have pockets of extra time in my day. I include in my list anything I want to be sure I get done and things I always forget to do--like pick up the mail at the end of the lane (my daughter always did this, but now that she is in college, we keep forgetting to do it). I print a new sheet each day.

On the right side of the paper is an hourly grid which helps me see the overview of the day--when I realize I must be in the car by 6:00 in the evening, then I also know that we cannot eat supper at the same time! My mind is perfectly capable of having 2 schedules running side by side in my head without realizing that the two will NOT work together. This grid helps me to visualize my day so that I will not have this happening.

At the bottom of the page I have enough room to write down my menu and any other notes that will help me.

My larger notebook is a new addition. I open up the page and write the days of the week down the side of the left page. I copy out items from the calendar and add other items I will need to remember. The right side of the page is the "to do" list that I'd like to work on throughout the week.

The little notebook is what I am currently using to track what I eat and what I do for exercise each day--a means of being accountable to myself.

So what do you do?