Ellie and Carley have been very pleased with themselves since I have been re-arranging "again", and they are always ready to hop over to a new location. I could just feel the some of you reading this, not again! Yes, this is my life, a furniture mover. Actually my father worked for a furniture business when I was a child and later he owned his own store. Maybe it is just in my blood?
This time was due to another necessity, our eldest dog Elizabeth has been having some possibly serious health issues and we had to bring the kennels back into the house. One for Elizabeth and one for Bernadette.
Elizabeth is having issues with her bladder and our Veterinarian put her on antibiotics, and we have her in diapers. They did an ultrasound and her bladder was much too large and they had to express urine. Then the next ultrasound her bladder wall was too thick. The night this all started she had a seizure.
We did not have a place for the kennels since we have not used them in several years.
I have many projects waiting for me to do after I finish getting organized enough to do the projects. Lately I feel like I am walking in sand where I step forwards only to slip a half a step backwards. There are so many things to be done and I often wonder how I stayed on top of things when I was younger with a busy family and now I am retired but cannot seem to keep up.
Last week Charles and I did something fun, we watched a series on youtube of a family that went through five decades of living in the past. It was fun because Charles and I both had lived through these years. It is called Life Through Time, look for the one that says the 50's because that is where this particular family started. It was in the UK and I think from living all of the 1950s here in the U.S. we would have been a bit further modern in some areas of our country. I remember when we got our first small black and white television between 1955 and 1956 and we watched Howdy Doody.
While we were watching this on youtube, the family live through five decades, and it made me realize how so many of us were guided to change each year, each decade. It was our choice but something else was pushing people to keep changing. I have done a lot of pondering on this ever since we finished watching all five episodes.
I noticed all the constant change and new things coming into the home and how they changed.
When Charles and I started studying the past and living more like the past we felt a relief from the lack of noise in the house, how our pets were calmer, and how it just felt right.
My problem when we are doing a history study is I get off track because if we are studying 1942, I want to know what their life was like before 1942 because I need to know what all they had learned before 1942 that helped them get through 1942. What eras did they go through and when I start researching I find myself back into the 1800s. One thing leads to another because I want to know how they did certain things.
When I started the big shift again this week with the kennels being needed back in the house and the realization that this is our time to let go of more items in our home. There is more reason to do this now. To be realistic we need to know the old ways and how to apply them to this time so we can merge the past and the present to get through what could be a very difficult time.
As I was placing my old irons on a shelf above the washing machine I wondered why did these irons change when they did what they needed to do? Advertising made us think that the next one was better, then the next one was better and the next but each one still works. The two in the middle are the ones I use the most often. The small one with the bottle is good to use when sewing.
For the past six months my feelings are that I need to get this house back to the old way of doing things because I keep feeling something is going to happen. I let what other people say push down my own feelings sometimes, but what if what I feel is going to happen does happen?
Charles and I already live a more old fashioned life but we still have our other foot in this modern world.
I decided that I need to go with my own intuition because that may be a God nudge that I am ignoring.
I feel that our country is about to go into a very difficult time and I don't want to be out there in the confusion if it does.
We keep a stocked pantry but how stocked do we need to be? That depends...
So I turned on my thinking cap and I thought about what if I wanted to make our favorite cake? Comfort food does have a purpose and that is to make life feel normal and it may be needed calories. Do I have everything in the pantry to make this cake? I did make some homemade Ghee so I have that for my butter. What if I cannot get eggs?
I could make an applesauce cake because in an applesauce cake the applesauce takes place of the eggs, the ghee takes place of the butter, that is why I made the ghee starting with butter from the store.
Could I make this yellow cake with chocolate icing using applesauce and ghee? I need to try.
I feel like in the 1930s and the 1940s through their difficult times they had to make a lot of substitutes. Shelf stable is what we need to work on. Cake was a very special treat during the great depression.
Comfort food is not a necessity but the basic shelf stable food is.
As I was re-arranging, the whole house was shifting and I had more purpose of where things were going.
I decided that we needed to stock up on a few more things such as pasta and tomatoes. The Petite diced tomatoes were on sale and the fettuccine was on sale. We also bought some canned soup that was on sale. We don't eat much canned soup but I have been wanting to make casseroles again because a simple casserole got us through some busy times in our life. The soup we purchased was canned cream of mushroom and canned cheddar cheese because these two types of soup would help out a casserole with some canned chicken, some stored rice.
I air seal our flour, I make bread each week so it is easy to keep rotated. I keep it in double quart jars.
I keep extra Kirk's castile soap on hand because it cost less than some of the other castile soap. If we see outages again, as long as we have castile soap we can use this to bathe, to wash dishes, to wash our laundry, to clean our house. It helps to keep some washing soda on hand to boost the laundry. There are many other soaps like grandma lye soap and such as that. Both soaps can do all of these things and clean the floor, walls, bathroom as well. It is soap, and soap is what we need to do these things.
I keep a box of candles put away... Just in case there is a long term power outage and all the other options are gone.
My sewing box with thread and needles and sewing notions.
This time of re-arranging, I am doing this differently in that I am trying to make it a more permanent way of living. Being that Charles and I have studied so many eras we change things often but now we need to settle in a way that we just live in a comfortable prepared way so we stop worrying about not being prepared enough. We can only prepare with the space that we have, so our choices of what we do keep and let go of is very important. We cannot be cluttered so we can find what we do have.
My new question I ask myself when I am decluttering is did they have this in the past? Would they have done okay without it?
We use this pencil sharpener quite often because we keep journals. It is very old and still works great. So many things today are plastic and poorly made.
We use this coffee grinder every morning. We air seal our coffee beans and grind a small amount at a time so to not waste a single coffee bean with the price of coffee being so high and still increasing.
I have been reading and keeping an eye out what might happen with the coffee situation. At this time I am doing this post they are saying that the system is under a serious strain and they are facing tight supplies and will keep raising the prices of coffee rather than a total shortage. Charles enjoys his morning coffee, I mostly drink water but occasionally drink tea.
I am sensitive to caffeine with heart rhythm issues and found that I can reduce the caffeine by pouring off the first tea from the strainer after about a minute soak. I use loose leaf instead of tea bags because there is some concerns about the tea bags today.
I don't know if it is true but some say the caffeine can decrease by 70 percent using this method of pouring off the first one minute tea soak. It is weaker tea and I can drink this with no issues. It is not decaffeinated, just much less caffeine.
My furniture is shifted in its new locations but there are still many items that I am keeping that are awaiting their new home.
My goal is that everything in our home has a place to live. That will be such a happy time in my life when that is completed. :)
Charles made our cheese toast for breakfast, a little heavy on the cheese but it was good. :)
Due to the way some of our stores are changing with surveillance, tracking, going digital, getting our personal information risking us to our identity being stollen or leaked, and trying to push us to their own private pay system, Charles and I have decided that we are going to support our local farms, our small butchers and produce stands. We want to do as little purchasing from large stores.
We want to purchase very little of items that is not food. The store we went to today does not do invasive surveillance and tracking like the larger stores in our area.
I am trying my best to grow a fall garden, to see what I can grow in the fall and winter. It is not easy but I need to keep trying. Our weather is so different now, the heat started early, and it was such exhausting hot summer. I am finding it simply too hot to grow summer vegetables here. Maybe living in the city heat changes the growing options. So not my concentration is to fall and winter gardening.
For our forum questions,
Do any of you have a substitute for eggs?
Do any of you have a substitute for Cheese?
Have any of you made any changes in your home to live a more prepared life?
Have you experienced problems gardening?
Are you working on any special projects?
Tell us or show us what you have been doing since we last heard from you.
Grandma Donna
