Coffee Chat: One More for January

 

Hello, loves.   It is Shabat evening and typically I do not write at this time.  I usually wait until Saturday evening after sundown and then I begin the posts that will go up for the weekly things.  You know, the plans and the Diary, etc.   But I realized with a start this afternoon that after this weekend January is done.  February is short and will fly past.  I wanted to talk to you one more time here in January.  I do not like to let a month get away from me without a chat every now and then.    How shall we maintain our relationship if we don't visit?   

It is true that among friends, days and weeks and months can go by and yet you can remain friends, picking up right where you left off, but it's so much nicer to stay apace of one another and keep up, isn't it?  I think so.

Tonight as we sat at the Shabat table,  I watched the flames of the candles and listened to John's prayers.   I'd been thinking about this spiritual journey.  I wondered why my journey doesn't look like anyone else's and then I started to chuckle.  Silly me!  Thinking that my journey should be just like yours and yours should look like mine.   It's not meant to!  Our lives aren't mirror images of one another.  My experiences and yours are different.   

Later, as I washed up our supper dishes, I talked this out in my head.  (Oh do you do that, too?  Have those silent long conversations with yourself?)  I likened it to going to St. Augustine.  Every time we've talked with friends of ours who visit there we share our last experiences.   We've done some of the same things but there are lots of things that were seen by one couple and not by the other.  We stayed in different places, we ate at different restaurants, we visited different sites.  Landmarks along the streets are the same but we both chose to do different things in our times there.  We didn't take the same routes to reach the place.  I loathe interstates and they don't trust the back roads.

It's really the same with our spiritual walks.  We're all heading to the same destination but how we get there, the things we experience along the way are different.  Some will sail, some will fly, some will walk, some will go by car.  Some will take the long cut as we call the longer, more scenic route and some will take the shortest route.  

The sad thing is that there are those who will insist if you don't do things as they do you're not going to arrive at the destination.  You will.  Trust God to have YOU on the right travel plan for your journey.

I had quite a week behind me.  I told you all about the things we did and where we went, but what I didn't share was my misery within myself for the first part of the week.  Unsure if the blood pressure medication was working, worried about why my blood sugar readings had been higher than usual.  Add to that a two day period when I just plain didn't feel good.   

I finally calmed down.   I ordered a blood pressure cuff and lo and behold it arrived a day and a half later.  When John took my pressure it was way down, well within a normal range.   As for the blood sugar numbers I decided to ignore them.  Truth they aren't so goshawful high.  They are within normal range after a normal meal.  I went back to look at the lab work results and my A1C was within pre-diabetes range.  Why was I so worried?  To be now within pre-diabetes instead of in full blown diabetes...There's nothing wrong with that!  

Whatever ailed me passed without incident and my energy returned and so did my general healthy outlook.  I am fine.  I am FINE!  Isn't it funny how we can get a bee in our bonnets about this ache or pain or that test result and forget that we're fine?   No, I'm not a hypochondriac but I might have passed for one this past week!

I told you all that the dishwasher went out on Sunday evening.  John apologized about the necessity to do dishes by hand.  Truth told it ain't so bad...at least right at the moment.  What makes it bearable at present is that it's cold (mostly) and standing over a big dishpan full of hot water is not such a big deal.  Were it summer, I'd have mutinied already!  But this time of year, it's a pleasant thing.  

As well, I've been conscientious about doing dishes three times a day instead of letting them pile up all day long.  I wash dishes ahead and behind each meal, meaning that as I work, I go right on and wash a dirty dish so there's not such a lot at the end of the meal.   It's a help, too, to continually put away dishes when they are dry.   I find that I start to feel antsy and then anxious if I'm looking at a stack of dishes or messy counters for long.   

I've gotten into the rhythm of washing dishes easily enough but I also have been very, very careful about how many dishes I've used at a time.  This evening's meal was a bit complicated and required more dishes than any this week.  Despite diligently cleaning up every thing ahead of the meal, there was still quite a stack at the end of Shabat to wash.  Having to wash dishes by hand is a great reason to look into simplified meals.

Today was such a pleasant day in our home.  The whole week has been really.  We've both had things to do, not hard stuff but lots of projects and tasks to attend to that kept us busy.  At the end of each day it was so pleasant to sit together and know we'd come to a natural place of rest.  It's my hopes, fingers crossed, that John is now at the point of retirement where he is starting to plan to do things each day.  I've worried, I truly have, that he'd sit his entire retirement before the TV but more and more lately he's getting up and getting busy.  I never wanted him to be the sort that worked all the time, but I felt that he'd feel more lively so to speak if he was interested in jobs he could do about the shed or yard or in the house.  I hope this keeps up!

I wasn't always motivated to do much when I was at home.  When I worked, it was easy enough to give the house a lick and a promise and then settle down to rest.  I was tired and weary and all I wanted was to do nothing.  What I really meant was that I wanted to do only what I most wanted to do.  Escape through reading or a movie and not think about the things around me that were patiently waiting to be attended to.

But eventually, I realized that living in a chaotic house increased my anxiety and my sense of 'i-can't-itis' that plagued me.   It took time and a load of self-discipline to figure out this housekeeping thing.   To be honest with you I was well in my 30's before I began to grasp it and most of that was courtesy of John.   Which is funny really because John is the one person who has refined the art of not doing anything at all.  Yet it's truth that he was the impetus to get things done.  He cut down on laundry by commanding us to air towels and clothes if it wasn't raining outside.  He suggested we do a load of clothes daily.  

I learned to prep supper before going to work and to thaw food ready for prep overnight so I didn't have that excuse to stop me from getting it done.  It wasn't just slow cooker meals. Long before I ever read of sheet pan dinners, I was making them.  All in one 9 x 13 meals, too.  It was pretty awesome to come in from work, put a pan of something into the oven, go put on the daily wash and then settle to rest until supper was done.  We swept floors daily and we did dishes daily, usually just once a day then because there was no dishwasher and having cooked breakfast, served it to six and then prepped supper all while getting myself and a toddler out the door on time was enough for any morning.

I learned quickly enough that in order to get out the door I had to have shoes, coats, keys, purse, necessary papers, etc. ready to go near the front door.   I hated those mornings when the house had to be torn to pieces to find a shoe that was left in the car and wasn't in the house anyway.  A landing station is helpful to put those things.

That was long before I became a stay at home wife and mom for good.   It was at least 10 years before I was able to do that and then I had to learn to really keep house...I'd only learned to attend to the basics.  Changing sheets routinely and dusting and mopping all came after.   You might call that basic, as I do, now, but back then it wasn't...Organizing and deep cleaning,  came much later down the road for me.  

I don't look at young women who are struggling with how to take care of house and home.  It takes time.  It takes experience.  It takes finding the methods that work for you.   Flylady worked fine for me but many systems prior to that didn't.  I had to learn how deep I wanted to clean home.   We'd lived for years with the removal of surface dirt and clutter and that worked just fine.   It was only later that I felt the need to neaten drawers and organize things and cull out what absolutely wasn't necessary.  

I read this blurb this morning in a 1942 Better Home and Garden magazine:  "In large houses or small, one of the secrets for comfort is to find places to put things away unobtrusively; then to remember always to put them there; then to remember where you've put them."  ~Harlan Miller

It was the last part I found terribly funny: remember where you've put them.  

John and I have a different form of logic.  While it seems perfectly normal to me to organize things in the most likely places John is the artist of finding the oddest places to put them.  For years, he kept plumbing parts in his dresser drawer with his jeans.  Not in the bathroom or under the sink nor in the shed in an area designated especially for plumbing.  For him, the logical place was his jeans drawer.

Important paper work ended up in a drawer, lying on an open table (where little hands threatened to grab and destroy) or behind a picture.  Yes, behind a picture hanging on the wall.  He'd just slide it between the backing board and the picture.  

He's learned that these are not places he's sure to remember.  Often things were found by accident rather than during the search when they were needed.  I took over all the important paper work and we consolidated it into one place.  He says he's no idea where it is...I roll my eyes and take him to where it's located and point it out.  I've written on top of the bin what's in it.  It's right where he sees it every single day. 

But never mind.  My mind doesn't organize a beat or single chord into a song that sounds like it was written by a musician.  His does.  He 'hears' it before it's written, before he's done more than strum the first note.   I can't do that.  That's the wonder of this world, that we can all be so very different and yet get on well together.

And remember, it was John who started me housekeeping in a routine sort of way.  I had been at it for 13 years on my own and 13 years under the direction of my mother but I'd learned nothing much in all that time. I let it overwhelm me.   When I did clean, I tended to work from the inside out and it took forever and I was deeply exhausted when I was done.  I say now, from experience, start on top, on the surface.  Learn to keep the table clear and the counters clean and the floors done and the dishes washed and the clothes put away, all those things that clutter up the visual aspects of a room.   Then figure out how to get beyond that into the other areas that bother you/your partner.

 We're about to sail into birthday season here.  Miss Millie will be 1 year old next week and Grampa and I go right into birthdays with her.  Amie and Isaac come up the next week and finally JD finishes out our month.   John and I are not making plans to celebrate our own until March.  Then we're going to do something big for ourselves.  In the meantime, we're going to have a special meal here at home and we will go to the bakery and choose our own sweet treat, just one slice of a special cake or pie or cupcake.  We don't either of us want a glut of sweet things in the house at present.  I'm saving the February 'glut' part for my annual day after Valentine's day box of candy, lol.  I usually manage to make that stretch into April.

I have a problem...Remember me talking about my recipe notebook?  For years upon years I collected recipes in print form.  At one point I had five boxes (and not small ones!) of cookbooks I'd collected.  I've culled those down to a dozen or slightly more, divided into story/recipes and recipes only type books.  I like to read about other people making food hence the story/recipe books.  

Then I started collecting loose recipes. Tore them from magazines, printed them off the computer, collected them from any body and every body.  I finally culled those down to the ones we'd actually tried and liked.   Good enough.  

I stopped taking magazines of any sort years ago, except for buying the vintage ones or the few I've been given by Bess' mom who by no means overloads me with them.  But then I started finding recipes online.  On blogs, in vlogs, on sponsored websites.  That I saved to a file on my computer.   Finally I just deleted them all as they numbered into the hundreds, too.   And then Pinterest came along and there I find hundreds of recipes, pin them, make one or maybe two in a year's time, then toss them all and start afresh.   I have become diligent about culling them down.  Or so I thought.

I keep a Home Keeping notebook and I have been for years now apparently, writing down recipes that sound good to me from old magazines, from vlogs, or ads or thoughts that pop in my head as worth trying.  And I have HUNDREDS, y'all.  I discovered this on Friday when I was sorting out the Inspiration pages I'd kept over the years.   So I have all these pages of handwritten recipes I've never tried interspersed amongst all the good ideas I'd had and wanted to keep track of.   Sigh.   What do you call a chronic collector of recipes?  Has anyone managed to overcome this malady?   Is there an intervention program?  Isn't it a certifiable condition?

Sunday afternoon, when every one has gone home from a visit at Gramma's (Taylor, Josh and Isaac will be here and maybe Caleb, too), if I have any energy at all left, I'm going to start the slow and laborious process of sorting out my ideas from the recipes and cull those down to just ideas I want to use, not recipes.  I think.  There may be one or two... HELP!

Well loves, I should end.   It's time to settle in for the evening.  It's getting colder by the moment and I'm ready to go snuggle down in bed and sleep deeply in the good cold winter air.