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A wonderful, important post! I've been thinking very similar things lately. We are replacing our back door because it has a window, and we want a solid door for more safety. I have a story about butter. I made a cottage pie for the freezer and wanted to have some frozen cookie dough balls to go with it for a complete meal. Since I'd just had a milk and egg delivery from the local farm, I made some butter from the cream for my cookies, and followed the recipe as written. Even though I used the stated amount of butter for the recipe, it was obvious that there was too much butter in the baked cookies. (I didn't freeze all of the dough.) Then it struck me that my farm milk has a much higher content of fat in the cream, and I should have adjusted!

We have fixed so many things wrong with our house this year that it finally feels comfortable. Comfortable in the way where you don't even have to think about it because everything works. It's the working background for the life inside the home. I finally threw out all of my meal plans and decided to create meals by what is in the garden, and it works a lot better than artificial meal plans. I got this idea from watching YouTube videos, some from people using what inexpensive ingredients they had to make meals, and part from the medieval diet that stayed the same but constantly changed. The basic medieval meal plan was bread and pottage, maybe some stewed meat, dairy, and fruits and nuts when available. The form stayed the same, but the ingredients changed with the seasons. Ruth Goodman in one of her videos pointed out that butter was made in the spring when the fat content was highest in the milk, and cheese was made later. That level of seasonality impressed me. Tomorrow night is chicken and dumplings with lots of vegetables from the garden, and that's our pottage for the day. 

When my house had things wrong with it, I felt like the outside world was intruding on my home since it was the outside world that had built my home so ridiculously, and that I was constantly fighting against the world even in my own home. Now that we've got almost everything fixed, my home feels like a refuge, and I feel safe and confident that I can keep the outside world outside when it belongs! 

After all of the lettuce recalls, I became determined to grow more lettuce. Maybe it's my small act of rebellion against a crazy world! I am experimenting with growing lettuce in a cold frame to see how long it lasts through the winter. I got another arch trellis too, since the winter squash one worked so amazingly well. I will grow peas then cucumbers on the new trellis next year. We grew a good amount of potatoes this year, but it took a lot of space. After watching Ruth Goodman talk about foods in their seasons, I realized that potatoes were for spring and summer, and sweet potatoes, which are ridiculously easy to grow and store well, are for fall and winter. 

I've very much enjoyed the video recommendations from others. I will throw out a recommendation of my own, and it's Ben Maton on YouTube. He goes around to old churches in the UK and plays beautiful music on their organs. He has excellent light commentary about history. His brother, Billy, sometimes sings the old songs, and that's a special treat. Ben attended Oxford.

I have started some fall plantings and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they will make it.  The heat has been really hard on my vegetable plants this summer.

I am still clearing out my kitchen cabinets and to some extent, the closets.  I plan to keep this up for as long as I can still find things I can bear to part with. I always feel calmer when there is less clutter. I find that if I return to a de-cluttered spot a few months later, I almost always find something else to sell or give away, that I could have gotten rid of the first time.

I grew up with country cooking and still cook it a lot, but I have added some other dishes.  Picadillo is a favorite, as is jambalaya, shawarma and some curries. I moved to Florida decades ago, so I learned to make things like shrimp and grits, scallops, and different ways to cook fish such as flounder.  As a kid in the upper south, we always only ate fried catfish, which I confess I still love.  My method of cooking these days is mostly to cook once and eat 2 or 3 times, with some exceptions. 

My pear tree has a bit of disease, but every 2 or 3 years I get a decent crop of disease-free pears.  The tree is old and the hurricanes "pruned" it greatly, but I was able to reach and pick a five-gallon bucket full of sand pears, which I then peeled, cored, sliced, cooked down, ran through a food mill and made pear sauce out of them.  I eat it as a side dish or with pork.  I canned 13 pint jars of pear sauce, which will last me a while since I'm the only one here these days.  

I am also getting ready to paint my bathroom.  The walls are washed and the taping is done.  I bought the paint on sale.

I enjoy getting out with a friend or family member and thrifting.  This weekend I went with a family member who is into fitness training and she found a $350 work out bench at an estate sale for $80.  I found a grocery cart with stair-climbing wheels for another family member who wants one.  It was marked $15, but I got it for $10 just by asking.  My goal is to limit what I bring into the house to 95% useful and 5% just because I truly love it.  I usually leave thrift stores and estate sales with nothing, but I still go, because now and then, I find just what I, or someone I know, is looking for.

I have been machine sewing some household items.  I want to learn some other handicraft skills, but I think winter, or at least chilly weather, is a better time for me to do so.  

Having just cleaned out my brother's unit, I don't want a single bit of clutter in my life ever again - I have a very few little keepsakes from my mum and dad and that's it, nothing else.  He died less than a fortnight ago, and I have his ashes here (no funeral, just a bare cremation which none of us attended as it was privately done) and then we've had the absolute nightmare of cleaning out his entire unit - and that equals his entire life.  He had so much junk, we ended up getting professionals in to clear it and as it's in a retirement village it was a matter of doing it then rather than later.  
We still have to get it professionally cleaned as at our age it's too much for us - and then there's the other nightmare of all his banking, paperwork and so on, very much ongoing and I never dreamed it'd be this hard.

Bear in mind that so far we've done four trips in six weeks, before and after his death, and each of those trips means a four hour drive each way - and still more to come.  We're exhausted, mentally and physically.  I'm struggling to even get meals on the table but I'm managing just the same - no take away meals happening here, thank heavens for freezers.