March 1: It's not spring by any means but this morning when we went outdoors the birds were fairly screeching their heads off in busy homemaking joy. It made me smile to hear them. I'd watched an especially eager bird begin the nest last week in the Faith tree. He even caught Isaac's attention. "What is that bird doing?"
I looked at the weather app once we'd settled in the car. Sure enough, the day and nighttime temperatures are far more in keeping with spring than with the last three weeks of winter.
Along with the warming weather, comes my impatience with the last of winter. I want to plant flowers, and dress in lighter things and see a flush of green. I'm completely unreasonable, because if I don't dress in layers I'll either burn up or freeze. About the only flowers I'm going to see are the bouquets I'll buy.
We had a lovely first day. Absolutely nothing special, just our usual sorts of things. Church, the grocery store, the long ride home, a good Sunday dinner, a nap...But all through the day I could feel my heart humming happily and contentedly along. Not a thing special but it was just a lovely day full of all the normal homely sorts of things.
March 2: This morning, despite a rather rough night, I jumped out of bed and started my day. I sailed right through it, wrote a post during a break from working, did some more work and here I am writing another post while I'm between tasks. It's been a most excellent day thus far. Not the least because I have been planning seasonal changes in my household while I've been busy. Changes in menus, changes in decor, changes in my wardrobe, changes in my play/fun time activities...
Can you tell I'm ready for changes?
I was out cleaning off the back porch this morning, making an attempt to make it look nice. I noted that BJ's Wholesale had ferns out already and they were about what I've always paid for them, not high like last year. I'll be picking one up this month and pop it into the big old wash pot on the back porch.
I've tentatively planned meals for the week, and then promptly changed my mind and decided to make other things entirely. After I get my flowers arranged, I'm going to go play in the closet and start to remove the heavy sweaters, access how they look. I know I have one or two that definitely need to be placed in the winter house clothes. They just won't do for public wearing another year, as much as I like them, but they do look nice enough for wearing here at home. I wouldn't be ashamed to open the door to company in them, well-worn though they may be.
I'll pull up Pinterest and see what I've saved there and try to put a few pieces of clothing together, ready to go through the week ahead. We're combining a car maintenance with a lunch date, tomorrow. I desperately want a haircut and thought I might take my Artist's Date at the same time. And then we've Church and an appointment over these seven days ahead so I'd like to be prepared.
At some point today, I hope to start flipping through my cookbooks and finding lighter, more Spring-like recipes to replace some of the heavier, slow cooking cold weather favorites. And while I'm doing all of that, I'm thinking of how I might update my home decor and make it look a little fresher, too.
I definitely have Spring Fever!
March 4: Yesterday we left home to run errands. I'd cleared my closet the afternoon before of all the heavy sweaters and packed them away. John had laughingly said, "Spring Fever has hit you!" when he saw the pile of clothes on the bed.
Well, fickle silly season that it is, we rose to 78F Monday afternoon and never got over 56F yesterday. Fortunately, I had a sweater out in the car that hadn't been packed away, and I wore it quite happily all day long! I should have known better that to think all the winter things could be packed away.
It was a nice day out, despite drizzly rain and clouds and the overall coolness. We took care of several errands, and I got a haircut, long overdue. I don't know about any other woman, but when my hair refuses to look decent no matter how carefully styled, then I am miserably unhappy. I went into the salon today armed with photos and showed them to the stylist. "But which one? They all look different!" Well to my eye they didn't. True they did vary a little in length but overall they had the same sort of wispy layers and while I knew full well I needed to grow out the hair over my ears, surely we could work toward something that was better looking than what I had...I appealed to her years of experience, and we worked out an idea that will allow me to look decent in the meantime, while working toward something that at least resembled one of the cuts I'd shown her.
Then I walked over to the grocery and picked up still more grocery items, things I'd realized I should have bought on Sunday: instant decaf coffee, half and half and cheese. Then I gave in a little too heartily to John's request for something sweet and picked up not only a bar cake but four packages of cookies as well. To be fair, three of those packages of cookies were store knock-offs of Girl Scout cookies, which we'd missed purchasing this year. And what I paid for four packages (with about the same amount of cookies in them as the Girl Scouts) came up to a pittance compared to one box of the sponsored cookies.
John and I went out to eat at the Mexican restaurant we like so well. We went in hungry and we came out vaguely dissatisfied. The entree I'd ordered was nothing like what my homemade version (made via a supposedly authentic recipe). And John, who seldom complains of a lack of flavor said, "It just seemed to lack something. Even the salsa wasn't quite good."
When we got home, I unloaded groceries, had a cup of coffee and a slice of cake with John and then I jumped back in my car and went up to Sam's to supervise a delivery he was expecting. Only Sam was home, having had a job interview earlier and then a phone call saying the delivery was coming in earlier than expected.
By the way, if you would all please pray in agreement with us that Sam gets a job in our county school system, I'd so appreciate it and so would he. Truth is he's been told there are no openings and no foreseeable openings in math at either the high school or junior high school levels. He's looking as far as 60 miles from home at school systems that are hiring. But he's no plans to move, no plans to move his kids to new school systems. His home and land are fully paid for. The kids are well suited to the schools they are attending. He's been unemployed now for over two years and wants very much to go back to work. The commute however will eat up time he might be at home with his kids.
It's my belief that someone might well experience a need to retire, or find themselves facing an unexpected move, or any number of non-fatal sorts of things that would leave an opening that he might fulfill. That's my prayer anyway.
Today, I've been bitten by the Spring bug all over again. And by the way, the weather has flipped on a dime again and today we're at 78F. Silly March weather! I decided I simply couldn't live with the lamp between our chairs a moment longer with its scratched-up paint job. I have looked for a replacement, contemplated painting it, etc. This morning while I was working about the house, it occurred to me I could decoupage the lamp with a pretty set of paper napkins I bought this past Fall.
It's a work in progress, but this is what I have thus far:
I've been looking at porcelain lamps very similar to this online but wouldn't pay the price wanted for any of them. I'm really pleased I had this inspiration. Mine will be a 'textured' finish, because I simply couldn't fit paper pieces over the curvy base so they were exactly flat, but I think it will be all right. And it allows me to keep the lamp a bit longer. It's sentimental to me since John and I bought this lamp when we first set up housekeeping together. We went into a local furnishings store and chose it together and bore it proudly home to become the symbol of our newly combined households. It's had a lot of incarnations over the years now, just as we have ourselves. Because of that, I'm quite happy to keep it.
Now I am off. I've gotten a reprieve from childcare today and I've promised John a cup of coffee and some of those cookies I bought yesterday. I've started a new book by Sarah Maas, A Court of Thorn and Roses and it's grabbed my attention hard.
March 10: I'm rolling my eyes over here on the other side of the screen. From March 4 to March 10...Where was I? I'll tell you where I was. I got LOST in the book I mentioned above, A Court of Thorn and Roses. I read it cover to cover in about three days, taking breaks every few hours and finished it on Friday. I was so ill and out of sorts when the book was done. Not because it had a poor ending, it didn't. It was just a very intense and fascinating read and when I finished, I felt like I'd been submerged under water for two days. I had the worst head fog! I can only describe it as 'book drunk', in the same way that heavy sleep will leave you befuddled and feeling as though you were drugged when all you'd done was sleep hard.
Language in this book was mild, the 'romance' not graphic, leaving it to your imagination, which I appreciated. I do look forward to reading more but wow oh wow. Even now I am still stunned at how deeply I got immersed in that book.
I have the whole series of these books, courtesy of Katie lending them to me, but I will not be starting the next one for a few days or possibly weeks because I literally lost track of time...and that was the smallest book in the series. Gracious, I can only imagine how long I shall be missing when I pick up the next one.
It was lovely to be lost in a book. I highly recommend it, if you've time to spare.
I took two hours Friday afternoon to write and study and clear my head by submersing myself in music and quiet in my workspace. I felt much livelier when I came out again.
Saturday, I took the kids to the library, as I'd promised I would. I'd worked periodically on genealogy over the past week with absolutely no luck at all with any of the research I'd been doing. So, imagine how I felt at the library on Saturday to pick up a book and immediately found information on another family line (a paternal line for my two oldest kids). I spent the entire hour copying off the pages by hand. It was fun to see Isaac's eyes light up when I showed him his three times great-grandfather's name which is the same as his own.
I find it amazing how often family names turn up within a family even when no one is aware of the family history. I wonder sometimes if we don't have a genetic memory that brings those names forward.
After the library, I took the kids to the local grocery to get frozen pizza, soda, chips and ice cream. Y'all...Let me just pause here to say I had very real SHOCK at how those costs added up. Our local grocery costs easily twice what we pay in the larger town where we shop. So that one meal set me back a pretty penny, let me tell you. I decided then and there that in future I can afford take-out over running into that grocery. In future, I'll plan ahead a bit better than I did this time, go out of town and have it here already. And lest you think it was Gramma spoiling the kids and letting them have whatever they'd like, it wasn't. I actually had planned out what we'd purchase before we'd gone to the library. I just failed to plan on what the local store costs!
Anyway, we had a grand time despite my burning one of the pizza's bottoms.
Sunday, we had a meeting after church. Knowing this I'd made a rather heavy breakfast for us before we left home. Originally, the plan was we'd all meet at a coffee shop, and I'd thought we'd get a snack there, but that fell through, so we met in a side room in the student building.
We went by Katie's afterwards and found she'd made lunch for us which was lovely because I was quite hungry by the time we arrived. We'd planned to stop for fast food on the way over but the lines at every one on our side of the highway had lines going around the building. So yes, it was a nice surprise to find she had cooked for us.
We came home and I took a long hard nap. Losing that hour of sleep cost me! But it was rather nice to see the sunset nearer 8pm.
Monday, I picked up a new book, second in a series by Jeff High. This one titled, Each Shining Hour is the sequel to his first More Things in Heaven and Earth. I needed the book because John had an appointment at the dermatologist's office and since I'm along for moral support, I needed something to fill my time. 24 hours later.... I have finished it. His books are quite good. High's premise is a young doctor who agrees to spend 3 years in a small-town practice. In turn, he not only earns a salary, but the town/county will pay off his student loans, provide him with a place to live and a housekeeper. The author is actually a traveling RN. Again, the language is mild, and the personal intimate relationships are not even mentioned beyond kisses although the author makes it clear that the main character is not jumping into an intimate relationship
But I didn't just spend the past 24 hours reading. No, indeed. While we were at the doctor's office yesterday, Katie called. She needed emotional support people (nothing wrong. She was dealing with a mental health issue, and she had delivered Henry to a daycare for the first time. Those two things combined with a workday was a bit overwhelming to her. She asked if we'd come watch the kids from 4-6pm. Which was delightful! Henry came in happy as could be, with a good report for his very first day away from Mama and home. Caleb and Bella came in like the 5- and 6- year-old siblings they are, with plenty of pent-up feelings and upsets. Everyone got a snack and then the two older ones took Grampa outdoors. Katie and I listened in as he refereed many little spats and quarrels, in between our own conversation. Henry lounged in the playpen watching Bluey and drinking his milk, totally relaxed and at ease after his big day.
After an hour, I went out and offered to spell John as referee which he quickly took me up on. The kids played just fine while I was out there. I guess they'd gotten all the contrary out and were just happy to be home by that point. We had a great time, and the last hour passed rapidly.
Katie had offered to make us supper, but I told her we had leftovers here at home that we'd reheat in the air fryer. And that's what we did.
And finally, here we are at today. I had determined that today was my day to do a big grocery shop. Restocking canned goods, produce, meats, staples that we'd used up during the two-month Pantry and Freezer Challenge. I had an amount in mind that I'd spend and I did it. I also did really well! I brought home one splurge item that wasn't on my list. It cost a whole $1.99: a giant Tootsie Roll for John. He absolutely loves Tootsie Rolls! I like Tootsie Pops but not Tootsie Rolls. I was in a specialty market getting sausage and bacon and they had the Tootsie Rolls at the counter. Easy sale.
I went first today to the discount grocery. Please do not think this is like the Sharp Shopper or Grocery Outlet sort of discount grocery we see and hear about on vlogs. Not at all! It pays to know prices when shopping in this store. The deal is that the groceries are supposed to be 'at cost' and they charge 10% more at the register. You can easily pay more than you'd pay in a premium store when adding the 10% to an item and it pays to keep that in mind. But what they do have that is a big draw is a reduced produce shelf. Today it was FULL. And the line waiting to get to that rack was LONG. There were four people ahead of me, and people who came in behind me to join the line.
Today I purchased Tomatillos, tomatoes, a box of Spring salad mix, bananas, bell peppers, green onions, squash. I took advantage of a sale on good quality chicken, buying several packages of bone-in thighs and several whole chickens.
The total there was more than I expected it to be, but it was fine. I adjusted my plans accordingly. Then I went to Kroger. I filled my buggy up. I didn't buy meats there. I have found that the meat prices at Kroger have gone through the roof. I did get produce, canned goods, pantry items, and dairy.
I spent exactly what I'd thought I might there. Then on to the specialty store where I bought a really good quality sausage and bacon. Here's the splurge part of my day. The meat isn't cheap. It's fresh. Really fresh. They smoke their own meats, too. I usually plan to buy enough bacon and sausage to last us two months when I go in. And my last purchase there is always a pair of nice thick pork chops.
I didn't spend my entire monthly budget today. I spent about 3/5 of it. It looked like I'd spent a lot more. I had many bags worth of food to put away. I couldn't help but contrast what I bought with the children on Saturday with what I purchased today. I spent about 1/10 of my budget for this month on Saturday. Two bags are all I came out with then. Today I emptied bag after bag after bag.
The only thing I didn't see today was corned beef. I'm hoping they were just holding it back and mean to put it out tomorrow when the next sales ads come out. I would like to get 3 at least, one for St. Patick's day and two for the freezer. We'll see.
This afternoon, once I'd unloaded groceries, I sat down in my chair and drank the unsweetened iced tea I'd purchased for myself. I went to sleep, too. I was truly tired, but a good tired. I finished the Jeff High book this evening.
Tomorrow...Gracious tomorrow, this woman is hoping to stay home, at least until time to go meet Isaac and Millie off the bus. I'll be dividing up meats to put in the freezer. And peeling bananas to go into the freezer for smoothies and banana muffins, and roasting tomatillos for green sauce. I have not made a meal plan for this week. I don't even have a clue what I might make. Tonight we had Pork Chops with Broccoli and Cheddar twice baked potatoes. I find the chops cook quickly usually in under 20 minutes.
I think that has us all caught up for now. I promise I shall not go missing in a book again anytime soon!
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