With the heat of summer here (it reached 109F/43 C on Thursday) my schedule has changed this week. My alarm goes off before dawn and I am up and outside, working in the garden, pulling weeds and deadheading roses. The weeds are particularly numerous this year. I work for an hour to an hour and…
Daily games of Rummikub and Ticket to Ride have marked our days lately, along with bike rides and playing in the garden in the evenings. I found free sheet music online for a song my daughter wanted to play on the piano and printed it for her. I picked apricots from the garden and canned…
I’m really grateful to be growing open-pollinated seeds. It makes it possible to collect seeds and replant them in the garden. I collected green onion seeds from the garden and replanted them to grow new onions. I also saved seeds to plant later. I collected snow pea seeds from the garden and will save them…
I harvested apricots, lettuce, rosemary, parsley, oregano, chives, green onions, a few alpine strawberries, and a handful of cherry tomatoes from the garden. After many years of trying to figure out the problem in one section of the gardening, I discovered that a main hose line was clogged. I replaced it and ran new lines…
We celebrated my youngest’s birthday with homemade eggless chocolate cupcakes. I had ordered gifts for him months ago, which seemed way ahead of time at the time, but I’m glad I had them now. We threw him a Ben and Holly birthday party. I used my frog molds that I’ve previously used for Harry Potter…
The weather was beautiful this past week. We even had a tiny bit of rain and enjoyed seeing a rainbow! We read books from our own library outside in the garden. It started to get rather warm (what some of you would consider hot and even hotter than summer temperatures in some places in the…
The weather is beautiful here. I’ve never experienced such a cool April in Las Vegas, and it’s made working outside extra enjoyable. It’s also saving us money as we have not needed to run the ceiling fans or the air conditioners yet. I cut flowers from the garden for the house. We celebrated a daughter’s…
Looking at the grocery ads that have been coming in the mail the last month, I’ve noticed that they are smaller (no outer flap and no inner pages)–about half the normal size. Sale prices are often double what the normal sale price would be at this time for things that I wait to buy at…
Like many of you are right now, we are concerned with making sure we’re safe and that we have food to eat. We want to stretch the money we have in our account to pay for our bills during this time. To that end, I am focusing heavily right now on making the garden as…
In this time when so many of us around the world are dealing with reduced and eliminated incomes, making the most of every penny goes a long way towards making what we have last and conserving funds to help pay our bills and to keep food on the table. I went over our budget for…
I am thankful for my pantry, freezers, fridge, and garden right now. I did not need to do any grocery shopping. There are things I would like to have that I do not and items that I am low on/out of that were on my shopping list, but I will make do without them. We…
If you’re now at home and are usually not, you’ve just been given a gift of several hours back in your day. Here are some great ways to make the most of this gift of time: Projects: Remember all those items you purchased to make or repair something but you never have had a chance…
