Been super busy lately and have been neglecting the journal, so here's an update of recent events in my life:
My 2 girls (14 and almost 16) just got back from an Easter Weekend
Youth Mission trip to Tijuana Mexico to help build an orphanage. Their eyes were opened to how most people in the world live and how living in true poverty does not keep people/children from experiencing joy in their everyday lives. I know their experience will have an impact on how they live the rest of their lives.
We've just finished a
big spring house clean and closet purge, items we didn't need went either to the thrift store or our recent church garage sale. We've
decided to paint our very "greige" home and picked up some paint during a recent sale at Rona Home & Garden. We moved into this house almost 4 years ago, and the sellers had painted it very neutral--the kitchen, 2 bathrooms, and family room are a "greige" colour, while our front living room and 3 bedrooms are a warm neutral called "light mocha" as per the paint can they left for touch-ups, but I wouldn't call it anything close to brown--more of a pale yellowy beige. I'm really really really tired of all the neutral!
So I bought a blue colour that is kinda "robin's egg" but more blue for the front living room and family room and a coordinating paler blue for the kitchen, my older daughter picked a pretty mauve for her room and my younger daughter picked a pretty pale apple green for her room, and we will paint our room a blue that is the colour in between the living/family room and kitchen on the paint colour card. We think the blue will look good with our hardwood floors and oak cabinets, although I'm contemplating painting the cabinets white because I prefer white cabinets and our cabinets are original to our 30-year old house and are looking a bit tired. We'll see after we paint.
I've also picked up a few inexpensive posters and prints over the past few months from etsy and local poster stores, and printed some old family photos and photos from trips we've taken that
I want to frame to add to our "art" collection and jazz up our soon-to-be painted walls even more
My
indoor-planted seeds are germinating all around me and I already have visions of a beautiful garden! Over the next few weeks I'll be planting early spring cold weather seeds out into the hoop green house. Can't wait till gardening is in full swing, but know I need to temper my enthusiasm because we can get frosts right up till early June here. Our mild winter and lovely spring so far really have me thinking that we're further into the season than we are!
A lot of what I/my family do along the lines of "self-sufficiency" involves growing food (as above) and storing/preparing food so a few updates along those lines:
I just took an inventory of our
summer canning from last year, and we are just under having used half of the tomato sauce and canned fruit (peaches, pears, fruit cocktail). We still have lots of pickles (cuke, beet, dilly beans), various veggie relishes, and jams--what we put up last year will probably last us 2 years so I need to do less of those things this summer or try new flavours. My
ongoing winter pressure canning of "convenience foods": soups, stews, meats, baked beans etc. has been going well and we're well stocked with all of those. So nice to just pull jars off the shelf for lunches and to make dinner prep quick and easy!
We continue to
bake our own bread from home-milled hard red and hard white wheat (we've found we prefer the flavour of the hard red or a mix of the two that is heavy on the hard red) and our 6-gallon grain bucket collection includes both types of wheat I've mentioned along with oats and rice as well as black, kidney, pinto, and navy beans. So nice to have our own stock of the basics (home-canned foods as well as dry) when planning meals.
Yogurt making continues and I think we've got it down to as much of a science as is possible with something that is a living process, we had to give up on milk-kefir because we found it was upsetting my older daughter's digestion (she was experiencing severe constipation and acid reflux, and when we removed things one by one from her diet it was the kefir that was affecting her--so much so that the day she had some again after 2 weeks off she had really bad acid reflux again). We didn't let our grains go to waste, but passed them on to others who wanted them. Not sure why my daughter had such trouble, as she loves all dairy products and eats home-made yogurt every day--nothing else has ever affected her.
I keep on with my
modified "once a month" cooking, and in addition to our home-canned convenience foods I never have an excuse to not have dinner on the table every evening. I don't always do a whole month of meals, but I do ensure that we have at least that many stocked up--usually more like two or three months of meals like we have at the moment.
That looks delicious...ALL of it!!!
