Diary of a Homemaker's Week: Blessed Days

 

Saturday:  Sometimes things just don't go well at all, and it's hard to see the things that come instead  the welcome things they might have been under other circumstances.  

Our day out yesterday was a disaster.  We ended up arguing gently about why that disaster occurred.  I sulked.  I did.  I sulked all the way back home, sulked all evening and most of the night, and had a good case of sulk going on still today.

I hid in videos all day long.  Took a nap.  And finally, my mood righted itself and it was smoother sailing from there.  

It didn't hurt that we spent the day quietly (aka not speaking), doing our own things and ignoring one another as best we could while being distantly polite.  Sometimes we just need to get the emotional distance if we can't get the necessary physical distance between us.

I walked outdoors this evening to dig some of the iris. No digging was necessary. I was able to just firmly grasp that stalk and tug gently.  I just pulled a few that were crowding in on others.  These are destined to be given to a couple at church that likes to work in their yard as a hobby. If I can scratch around the chinaberry tree in the middle of the yard, I might go out there and pull some more iris to move down around that tree.  It would surely be a gorgeous sight come next spring.

Sunday:  Food for thought from today's sermon.  I like sermons that spur me to think hard about what's been said.

After church, I gave the iris to our acquaintances.  They gifted me a box of tiny vincas, 2 zucchini, and one tomato plant.   Then I bought a pretty little fig tree and another tomato plant at the grocery store.  I'm going to garden a bit this year after all.  I'd been undecided but sometimes we just need to do things...and I love to make things grow.

Home to get the house back in shape, make meals, and not work too hard.  There's plenty of that for the week ahead.  Today we can afford another day's rest.  Bad moods are not restful, are they?  

Monday:  I woke full of ambitions this morning and I'm worn out now that I've been so busy.  I cleaned the house, then had a big work session in my kitchen.  I still need to handwash dishes that can't go in the dishwasher and finish making our supper.  I worked so hard and yet I can tell you I didn't get around to doing a single thing that I really wanted to do today at all.  Well, that's just the way days go at times.  They are too full of 'have to do' and not long enough for 'want to'.

I wanted to tell you all that on Friday while we were coming back home after our failed date day, we came across a deer at the side of the road, apparently grazing.   We were both shocked that it had white as well as brown mixed on its hide.  I looked it up and a Piebald deer is a rare thing, only 1% of the deer population in Georgia.  We reported the siting to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources as the article I'd come across stated we should.  

Tuesday:  I have just finished getting the goals for May written out on the blog.  I wonder if I'm trying to do too much?  There never seem to be nearly enough hours in my day...and I do not want to feel guilty for taking moments to sit down, relax, and rest.  I find it so much more beneficial than pushing myself to go on endlessly until I'm snappy, in pain, and irritable.  

Regardless, I get so excited by the idea of a new month to accomplish things in that I want to plan every single thing I can think of.  Then I cut the list back and still wonder at the end of each month if I overplanned or just failed to plan properly.  

I'll say it was a failure to plan properly.  You see, I count on the work I want to get done and fail to plan things like appointments, busy weekends, family visits that weren't planned, days out, etc.  In other words, I fail to plan the rest of my life.

I'm not sure I planned for life outside of chores this month either, lol.  But here's the real deal: I'm not too bothered by family visits, appointments, or days out taking away my work time.  I try to do as Grandmother and Granny did: stop and enjoy those moments.  That work I want to do waits so patiently upon me.  It either will get done or won't but children grow up, partners get sick, and family visits may cease for any number of reasons.  Enjoy the real parts of living for as long as you can.  And let the work wait.  If you're serious about it, you'll get it done, at least in some part.  

Wednesday:  Millie here for a wee bit first thing this morning.  She was not happy.  Sam told me she'd just woken up.  She most assuredly did not want to be at Gramma's house today.  I told her she could lie back down if she wanted to and started making breakfast.  I looked up at one point and she was peeking around the bedroom door frame with her sweet smile plastered all over her face.  She was quite happy in less than 15 minutes. 

The little stinker asked to go outdoors to play and John and I sat here listening to her sing and talk and chatter.  I heard the back door open and Millie talking on the front porch at the same time.  Sam asked where she was and I said, "Just here on the porch..." but no, she wasn't.  Nor did she answer when called.  I told Sam, "I promise you she was talking on the front porch as you came in the back door..." Apparently, she'd run to the back door to greet her dad.  

There's a dead zone between the front porch and the back for some reason.  The dogs never heard me on the front porch calling them, nor the children or grandchildren.  I don't know why that is so, but it is.  I confess that while I was pretty sure she'd run to the back porch, I felt a little ill over the panic I heard in Sam's voice as he called her repeatedly.  John and I both were up looking for her ourselves, both protesting that we'd just been listening to her play on the porch...All ended well.

After they left, I cleaned and tidied, worked on our household accounts, brought the checkbook up to date and then dusted the living room, cleaning the blinds well today.  I'd dusted the dining room and the return register grating yesterday.  Then I contemplated what I might do.  I decided I wanted to get the back porch furniture painted.  

It was hot outdoors, far more than warm and I wasn't expecting that.  I was sitting in the shade but it was HOT just the same.  And my mind took a turn towards complaining.  I groused to myself over this and that and another thing and then went back to the beginning and started over again.  I was as hot under the collar as I was in fact!  

Do you know what got me started this morning?  It's a silly thing but it's truly what set the pace of my day and I groused then too.  I had to get up early this morning with Millie coming over early.  Not a problem.  I set my alarm for 6:30 am.  Now I already have a little anxiety about missing an alarm.  I think in all my life I've slept right through ONE alarm.  ONE.  Yet every day that I have to wake to an alarm, I have this anxiousness that keeps me waking and checking to see if the alarm has gone off yet.  So it's a very broken night of sleep.  And this morning, I'd just woken at 5:30 and was assured I had an hour yet and went back to sleep without any trouble at all.  Only to wake a half hour later because John set his alarm for 6 am.   And there's no chance at all I'm going back to sleep once his alarm has sounded, even if I do have an added half hour.  Why?  Why must he set his alarm a half hour ahead of mine?!  It's not like I don't get up when my own alarm goes off.   I asked him as much this morning in a not-very-nice way.  That's how the day started.  

This afternoon I was sitting here beside him while he watched tv.  The program he was watching had a droning plane and I drifted right off.  And the moment he noticed I was asleep, he very nicely popped in his earbuds so I wouldn't be disturbed.  Well, I was.  The moment that droning stopped, I woke right up and I groused about that too.

The truth is I'm not having a very nice week.  It's not the week not being nice.  It's me.

Thursday:  I puttered here in the house this morning.  It's days like this when I feel most like I am playing house.  I don't concentrate on working hard or doing any deep cleaning.  I just go about and do gentle jobs: rearrange flowers, put on new pillow covers, put afghans away for the year, wipe off tables, and put out fresh linens.  Just putter and putter.  I find that such a relaxing and pleasant way to spend a day in my home, especially after several days of working hard.

This afternoon, I allowed myself to stay on the computer and do research.  I was looking things up on just one subject and I got a good idea of how I mean to work this particular idea.  

I watered plants outdoors this afternoon.  It's been so hot and dry lately that we've been under a burn ban.  I was concerned about all that rain we had this winter and very early spring because it's part of a pattern we go through with a dry summer following a wet winter.  It will be challenging to keep pots watered.

Friday:  All week long, as I've come back to the vlog to write, I've started at the beginning and corrected every underlined portion.  Every single one.  Every day.  And every day, when I return to this post, there are a slew of new underlinings.

Purple, red, blue, faint red, faintly blue...I find it very discouraging.  I get very frustrated when the argument is that the programs don't like a word I've used.  Sometimes they suggest alternatives: 'purchase' for 'buy'...Excuse me?  What's the difference?  Or one demands I add punctuation and the other program that runs simultaneously goes nuts and insists that is incorrect.  Or two programs disagree on how a word is spelled...or whether a perfectly legitimate word is even actually a word.

I give up.  Not writing but trying to correct it all.  I've tried to disable these programs with no luck whatsoever.  I beg your pardon for any glaringly incorrect things but I'm just going to write as I used to write and do my best with it.  

Spent the morning with Caleb, while Katie went to the OB.  That young man was in rare form today.  He talked and talked. He told me about the kittens, how he wanted to stay small and not get big, but still be a big brother, etc.  He has quite the imagination and made up more stuff to tell us.   We went outdoors to play a bit.  I felt bad when I made him move away from his swing set.  There were plenty of weeds and shrubs around back near the swing set and while he was enjoying having me swing him, I was wary of mosquitoes.  We returned to the front yard where his water table, sand, and a smaller slide were.  

After we left Kate's we started our little round of errands.  We went by the eyeglass place to get John's new glasses adjusted again.  He'd refused to wear them because they slid off his face so much.  The woman took one look at them and asked, "Who stretched them out of shape?!"  We now suspect a grandboy may have picked them up and splayed them open...They now fit John well once more.  I'm glad because the next course of action was that he planned to order another new pair of glasses!

Over to Lowe's to buy mulch and soil.  No kidding, I hate to go to that particular Lowe's.  There is never anyone to help or even offer to help.  John dislikes the other Lowe's location in the area and I understand why.  It's in a very high-traffic area with difficult ins/outs...but sheesh it would be nice to go into Lowe's just once and have someone actually HELP.

At least 8 employees were blocking an aisle.  I assume it was a training talk but customer service was not the topic.  The topic was the better fabric to wear: polyester or cotton...and did not include the value of offering to help a customer or even to politely STOP blocking the only aisle wide enough for the cart we were pushing to haul mulch and soil.  Shaking my head...

And it was so stinking HOT outdoors.  I wanted to get mulch now because it may rain this weekend and if the soil and mulch are wet, John is NOT going to haul it at all.  I got four bags of mulch, two of soil, and a very grumpy husband, not to mention both of us getting wringing wet with sweat.  Ugh.  I also grabbed two pots of basil and one peppermint since my own mint had disappeared. Here's hoping I get a good crop of both herbs this year.

John decided we needed an ice cream cone.  Fortunately, there is a Dairy Queen in the same shopping center.  It was good but you must eat it fast on a hot day.

Time for me to get supper started.  

I hope you had a pleasant week.  We'll be going back to Katie's tomorrow for a gender reveal party and at last Caleb will know what the baby is going to be.  He still says he wants a brother, but told me quietly today that he thinks it's a girl...lol.  Poor little fellow, he really did sound disappointed but resigned.  At least he didn't ask for Mickey Mouse the way Josh did when Bess was pregnant with Isaac, lol.

Have a great weekend!

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