I had a good visit to St. Louis. The baby was so very, very good the entire time. I was able to visit with family that I haven’t seen for years, as well as visit the graves of several of my ancestors. Both memorial services went well. I learned, among other things, that my grandmother…
I spent some time looking at dresses online. It seems that the going rate for a dress today is around $100 (or more). I am often asked if it is worth it to sew. I should be able to make several dresses for myself for under $10 each with fabric that I bought on sale. I…
We had some friends visit from out of town. I thought they weren’t going to be able to come, but at the last minute they said they were on their way, and I was so excited they could make it! I made meals from what we had on hand. Cyrus washed the windows before…
What a beautiful week we’ve had! We had rain twice this week; once on Monday evening and then early on Saturday morning. It is very unusual to get any rain in August, and we missed our 1-2 days of rain in July that usually come (they never did this year). Monday’s rain was a half inch…
I am still ill but was determined to accomplish as much as possible last week. Unfortunately, that went like this: I was laying in bed on Sunday with a pen and paper on the bed next to me, and I thought, “Why don’t I write a list of the things I can get done this…
I spent almost all of last week sick in bed. I managed to get up to wash a few loads of laundry and do a couple of things. I’ve written all of the posts I had hoped to share with you last week–but a couple of them aren’t published yet until I can get up…
I sewed a new cover for Winter’s bicycle seat using leather scraps we had. We’re going to make some covers for her handles as well as repaint her bike in the next couple of weeks. From the garden, we harvested grapes, a few tomatoes, figs, a pear, 2 Armenian cucumbers, a zucchini, basil, and green…
This past week, I did a lot of rearranging of pictures in the house. I changed out some pictures in frames that we already had and hung pictures in the house in new places. I also redesigned my gallery wall above the dining table. I had to steal three matching frames from elsewhere in…
It’s the middle of summer and temperatures here reached 114º (45ºC) last week. We’re mostly staying indoors, but we did get some things picked from the garden, including table grapes and Concord grapes. I’ve had a Concord vine for many years, and this is the first time I’ve harvested from it. I have 2…
This post contains affiliate links. I spent a lot of time organizing this past week. We moved furniture around in the house to other rooms, filled several bags to donate (and dropped them off at the thrift shop), sold furniture on the local Facebook garage sale page (and put a price tag of $0…
We picked peaches, apricots, and grapes from the garden. I canned 4 quarts of applesauce, 10 1/2 pints apricot vanilla jam, 9 quarts of peaches, and 9 quarts of grape juice from our garden produce. I canned 4 quarts of cranberry juice and 4 1/2 pints of cranberry sauce with cranberries I had bought in…
Last week did not go at all as I had planned. The garden has a myriad of fruit ripe all at once, which is normally ripe over a three month period, leaving me scrambling to harvest and preserve it. Normally we would just eat most of it fresh and preserve some of it, but the…