Diary of a Homemaker's Week: Darn!

 

Saturday:  Today John volunteered his services.  I go along to act as a sound person and sit on the sidelines.  When his task was done, we did our usual: we ordered a pizza and came home.  

It sounds like today wasn't anything much, but it was fine.  I enjoyed watching and praying over people, listening to a friend give a rather good sermon, enjoying John's great music and having pleasant journeys to the venue and back home.  We had a meal that cost me no effort beyond going in to pick it up.  We spent the bulk of the day relaxing once we were home and it was nice.

Sunday:  Up early again this morning.  We went to church and hung around a bit afterward and talked to various people we know and enjoyed conversations with several.  

Katie asked if we could do fried chicken Sunday at her house today, which suited us just fine.  We're already in her town.   We went into the grocery to hopefully find chicken but came out with wings and tenders.  That's all we could get today.  We had a nice lunch and a lovely visit.  Bella, 5 months younger than Caleb but not quite on his level developmentally has really opened up to us, which is a delight.  Taylor was here for the weekend, as well.  Caleb is happy and peaceful.

Gary, Cody's dad, whom Taylor and Caleb call "Not the Mama" looked at Caleb cuddled up to me (that's after the two girls had gotten off my lap.  I was sitting on a loveseat, and it was all I could do to hold all three, lol).  "He sure does love you."  I nodded.  "He's too attached to me.  It's good for him to be here with you all."  Gary said, "He's making progress.  This week he told me 'This is my home.' "  I loved hearing that.  Caleb has insisted for the very longest time now that our house was his home, and he would get upset when anyone suggested he belonged with his mama in whatever house she lived in.  This move has been a blessing and for this I am grateful.

I had a great time visiting.  We stopped for ice cream on our way home.  Just an ice cream sandwich from a convenience store, but it was good.   

We were meant to go out again this evening, but we are worn out.  John has to go back to church tomorrow for a men's meeting.  He said he just didn't want to go back tonight and that's quite all right with me.  

I can't remember just why I looked at our order for glasses, but I did today and discovered that John's glasses prescription was wrong.  I don't know if it's because Katie was trying to batch two orders into one, but it transposed my prescription over him and that was the order.  Unfortunately, the things are being manufactured and I can't change them now.  I reordered for him with the correct prescription but doggone it February has been a darn tough month where finances are concerned.  Ugh!

Monday:  I had a lovely morning puttering around my home, making it all clean and tidy after the weekend.  I thoroughly enjoyed my homemaking today, which was doubly appreciated because I find it such a soothing thing to do and because we didn't have to leave to go anywhere.  It felt luxurious to be at home...

I spent my afternoon looking at Fly Lady's site resetting my Home Notebook and Home Keeping  Schedule.  I typically reset my notebook at the end of December but this year, I was so busy with home renovations that I just didn't get it done.  

That said, I was convinced John had to go out to church for a men's meeting this evening.  I thought it yesterday, thought it all day today, and reminded him this afternoon to get ready in time. He sort of groaned and then for whatever reason decided to look online and see what time the meeting started.  Well, he couldn't find any announcement of the meeting at all.  We both went to the app and online and finally, I said, "Maybe it was last week and you missed it."  

He went and looked at the calendar and said, "Yes it was last week...Wait a minute, Terri!  I went to that meeting last week!"  I looked at him and said slowly, "I remember...I had fish that night because you don't like it."   He looked hard at me and shook his head and said "I can't believe you were convinced that I had to go out tonight..."  I smiled sweetly at him and said, "I truly thought you had to go, but gee...you weren't at all hard to convince!"  He laughed and said, "I was hoping you hadn't noticed that part!"   I am glad he didn't drive over only to discover there was no meeting.  However, it did send me scrambling to the kitchen to attend to supper preparations because I was so convinced by my own thinking that I had done NOTHING for supper tonight at all.  I was planning to just scratch around and fix whatever I found for myself.  I managed to come up with something tasty.

Tuesday:  I had an initial slow start to my day, but I got up and got busy.  What amazes me is how much one can accomplish in a mere two and a half hours.  

I went into the kitchen where I made bagel dough, and meatballs, cooked chicken for enchiladas, made spaghetti sauce (vegetarian), and then processed an orange bell pepper and a butternut squash for the freezer.  I vacuumed my room deeply, including the blinds and the headboard (fabric covered), and the closet floor which had quite a crop of dust bunnies.  I rearranged the stuff in the bottom of the closet and made better sense of how things were packed in there.  Now we can easily access our luggage which we reach for often enough.  I folded and put away laundry, finished off the bagels, and heated up lunch.  

John worked on taxes after lunch.  No refund for us again this year but we at least don't have to pay out a load of money either.  I'll be curious to see how things go when we file 2024 taxes since things will look a little differently now that I'm on Medicare.

I gave myself permission to have a quiet afternoon. I felt weary, though I've no idea why I should.  I mean, I got a lot accomplished, but it was none of it very heavy duty and I thought I slept very well last night.  Regardless, I took a long nap this afternoon.  

I was on Pinterest the other evening and discovered examples of Art Journals.  Wow oh wow!  That's something I would love to try my hand at.  What a luxury to think I might have time for this sort of creativity.  

Wednesday:  Sigh...I've worked and worked...or so it feels.  Truth, I didn't get started until 11am and then I stopped at 1pm.  Took about an hour or so break and then worked another hour and a half.  But it's ENOUGH to make me tired!

This morning, I decided I'd finish dusting my room.  I did not dust John's dresser top.  I asked permission and he said I'd just lose his stuff.  I promised him I only wanted to remove, dust, and dust each item as I put it back, but he said "Please don't.  You'll just move something when I know right where it is."  Now I'm pretty sure he has no clue what is on top of that chest of drawers, nor where anything is, but he believes he does.  And who am I to go mess with his stuff?  I'd be pretty well peeved if he decided to rearrange my things (which is most of the house, excluding his music room and dresser).  So I suggested he dust it.  And no, I'm not holding my breath.  

But it wasn't just dusting my room.  I started sorting things.  I had this powder box with a bunch of random things and that one full of more random things and my desk drawers were really not convenient for me because the one I opened the most frequently was always bumping into the shredder.  So I dusted and I sorted.  And John somehow got inspired by all my being busy and really deep vacuumed the living room, moving all the furniture to get under it, including the area rug under the dining table which we moved and centered on the windows.  It had been gradually getting pushed closer and closer to the buffet.  It had gotten so close that when any adult sat on that side of the table, the chair rubbed the curved edge of the buffet and was taking off the finish.  

Is it starting to sound as though maybe we are doing a spring clean?  It's started to feel that way!  And it's not at all what I meant to do but I'm not complaining about getting things looking nice.  I noted on the Fly Lady site that she'd mentioned wiping doors and door handles when you are cleaning a room and that's something I'd noted was looking a bit grungy.  So, I cleaned the master bath, closet, and bedroom doors with a wet sponge and followed up with a dry cloth.   

Then I decided I'd done quite enough in my room and headed off to the kitchen to be faced with a dishwasher to be unloaded, the dry dishes I'd hand-washed last night still stacked on the drying mat, and a clock that reminded me it was well past noon and time to prepare lunch.   By the time I'd done those jobs and sat down with a lunch plate, I was more than ready to sit for a little while.

Do not think I was idle during this time.  I sorted out the email (42 messages today...That's roughly triple my usual emails).  I did some online shopping.  Then I got up and got busy all over again.

I'd noted that the contents of the drawers on the island were not in a reasonable order. You'd think, the two islands being exactly the same the drawers would be interchangeable.  So, I thought, but no. I had to empty the two drawers and that meant that if I was emptying, I might as well sort them, too.  There's one piece that John nor I could figure out what it went to or what it might do...and having once before tossed a mystery object and then discovered it belonged to a rather pricey mixer attachment...I wasn't inclined to throw this mystery object away!  Thankfully it's not large.  

Do you know what nearly broke me?  All those sippy cups that were left behind when Katie and Caleb moved.  Not the Ninja Turtle ones but the ones that Caleb drank from when he was new to using cups...Sad face here.  I set those aside because they will come in handy in the future.

So, the drawers were cleaned and rearranged in a better way to suit my work in the kitchen.  

I was determined to do something in the guest/playroom today, so I headed there next.  I didn't get as much done but I did empty the antique trunk that belonged to Aunt Leeza.  This is an old tin trunk and while it's not heavy it's fairly fragile and I'm fearful that it will come down on a child's hands.  And you know those children will not leave it alone.  I've caught them many times now opening the thing up (it creaks too I do know).  

I had filled it with all the pieces of fabric I'd collected over the past few years.  I decided today to let go of all of it but the upholstery fabric that I currently plan to use.  I've been looking at some of those pieces of fabric now for years and they are too pretty to keep and not use.  I'm going to pass them on.  So, I filled an entire bag with fabric to be donated.  

My first thought was, "But if I want to sew, I won't have fabric..."  and then I reminded myself that every single time I've wanted to sew I went out and bought fabric for that specific project anyway.  These pieces were given to me or bought as remnants because I thought they were pretty...and they are.  But they aren't useful to me, because I never had a plan for them.

By the time I'd arranged what I was wanting to keep in the chifforobe and sorted out another lot of Katie's things to pass on to her, I was pretty much done. I can't say the guest room looks a bit better either, but there's always another day.

Thursday:  Very little was done in the house today, but I did swap out my old bedroom lamps for the new ones which arrived this afternoon.  I am pretty pleased with them.  It was just the refreshing touch the room desperately needed.  

I ordered the lamps in ivory/white.  I was seriously considering pink, and John said, "You'd better make sure you want pink before you order them because you'll be living with it for a long while."  He was quite right.  My room colors haven't changed over the past five or more years but it's inevitable that at some point I'm going to want a change.  As it is, all I really want to change just now is the spring/summer shams when I go for the lighter spread for the warmer months.  But if I bought pink lamps, lovely as they were, without a doubt I'd want to change to something that didn't fit with pink as an accent color.

When I came in from my visit to Mama, John had a snack of apple and cheese cubes ready which was much appreciated. 

And that was pretty much all of our day!  It sounds terribly boring, but we both enjoyed the day out.  We just had no energy for anything further.  

Friday:  Up extra early this morning.  I knew Millie would arrive early because Sam had an early appointment to attend to.  I had just enough time to get a cup of coffee after we'd stripped and remade the bed in our room for Friday's laundry.

For probably the first half hour or so, we didn't have Millie.  We had a cat.  A continually meowing cat, who when Grampa asked her what something was, meowed the answer and refused to say in human speak exactly what she'd said.  We just let her be a cat and after a bit, she decided that being a girl and eating a donut was the way to go.  Good thing for her.  I wasn't about to waste a big donut on a cat!

John's friend bought the donuts and sent them home with him yesterday.  They are big homemade donuts and are always appreciated. I reheated them in a very low oven this morning which makes them fluff up and get super tender all over again.  Yum!

When Sam came in, he noted that Millie had a bit of donut on her plate and oohed over it.  We had to direct his attention to the one we'd left for him.   When we lived in that county, we'd often take advantage of the local eateries for good food.  We seldom are patrons of the local places here.  It's not that the food isn't quality food, because it is.  But we've only one place in town that we might eat at and it's pricey.  If we drive 11 miles west, we have the option of several local places but on the other hand, if we drive 11 miles east, we have more franchises/chains to choose from.  

Sam stayed and talked a good long while, until lunchtime.  When they went home, I made our lunch.  While lunch was cooking, I refined the look of the open shelving in the bathroom.  I still need to find bins to tame the messy monster at the bottom of that space.  I know I have two bins that would look nice there and not be see-through.  I'll have to figure out a labeling system so John can tell where things are, though.  In the meantime, the shelves look a lot neater.

Since lunch, I've asked John to move the old tin trunk into our room and I'm about to load it up with all the linens stored in the cedar trunk.  Then the cedar trunk will move to the back entry so we can store shoes in it and not have a constant lot of grit and grass on the floors.  And the bench that is at the backdoor will move out to the back porch.  I think Katie wants it for her front porch, but we'll see.  

I shall end up here for this week.  

Did you do anything special, fun, absolutely normal but which you enjoyed?  Do you have plans for the weekend ahead?  Let us know!

Amazon Associate Affiliate Link:  If you place an order through my Amazon link I may earn a small commission.  Thank you!