Comments On Article: Finally September!

If you would like to share your comments for article Finally September!, this is where to do it! 

Click the Reply To This Topic button below to post yours.

I have never been a technology fan, but it has come in handy for genealogy research and typing up Word documents. Lately, I have become more and more agitated by using it and having it sitting around.

I was thinking, last week, about how much more I accomplished around our home before we had cell phones, tablets and a computer. In all honesty technology frustrates me. Even my children, in their 50's, didn't grow up with computers in their school rooms.

I have so many interests and, long ago, I pieced and quilted by hand. I did crewel embroidery and so enjoyed that. It is interesting to actually go to the setting on my tablet that shows the amount of time searching and reading on the tablet. Technology can be huge time wasters, which is what started me thinking, last week, about pre all these time wasters.

I confess that I am guilty of reading too long on my tablet when I am feeling poorly. I used to read books and I prefer that actually. Books, these days, are very expensive and so few come in giant print.

I am looking forward to the findings of no technology for a month. I am currently writing books, on our genealogy, for my children, so I will need to continue on that. Life only has so many breaths; then it stops. I have researched for 45 years and have many birth certificates, death certificates, deeds, newspaper articles, etc. going back to the 1600's. I need to get the family history books done, before that last breath.????

Thank you, Donna, for another wonderful post.

I am very relieved to be done with my budget. I feel I am doing the best I can for whatever ends up happening. Now that I am not spending every minute thinking about the budget, I've been free to relax and think about and do other things, like my mending. I finished my pants-into-shorts and made two blouses into a dress. I took my lightweight sweatpants and wanted to reinforce the seat so they would last longer, and found a small hole, so I got to them just in time. :) I am now working on two worn dresses that I am turning into a blouse each. I wasted so much money buying new clothes before I learned how to remake old ones into other kinds of clothing! I think it's very 1930's to do this. :) 

I got an email from our local bird society at the beginning of this year sounding panicked at the loss of birds we've been experiencing here. That's what made me start feeding the birds this year. One of the seeds from the birdseed planted itself and grew into a lovely sunflower in the garden. We harvested the seed head and put it seedside-up on the patio for the birds to eat. I wish I could grow all of my own birdseed, but at least I can grow a few more sunflowers from the seed next year. The birds decided to help me out with affording feeding them and planted a pokeweed in my garden. Pokeweed has berries that are nutritious for birds and wildlife and can even be eaten by them dried in the winter when the plant has died back, according to the internet. They planted it conveniently in a less used part of the garden. Pokeweed is a perennial. I don't know if feeding birds is a particularly 1930's thing to do, but they are an inexpensive joy to have around. 

I would love to see your menu plan, Grandma Donna.

I would like to take the October break too, to help me decide where the internet fits into our old-fashioned life. I would hate to be without the inspiration and knowledge of this blog and forum, so there's a place for the internet, but how much and how to? The October break should help answer those questions. 

One day back in August it was still too hot to go outside much, and the next day the nights cooled off and the days got nice. But I'm suspicious of this early fall, and I've been cutting off melons on the vines in the garden to make sure the remaining ones ripen in case the weather gets cooler. 

I was born in 1943 and the small town where I lived in Southern Iowa was not much changed from the 1930s until the 1950s.  The stores stayed open on Saturday evenings and the farmers came to town to trade.  The sidewalks were full of people standing and visiting.  During the summer months there was a band concert.  All of that went away when TV arrived in the mid-1950s.

The town also had a movie theatre and TV also ended that.  Movies were a very important part of life in the 1930s and 1940s.  During the war years, the newsreels were everything to citizens because everyone had someone family or friend serving in the military.

We used non-electric machines for the 10 years I worked at my first job.  No correction fluid so you had to attempt to erase errors without messing up the paper.   No copy machines so carbon paper was needed to make a file copy.  For big projects we had a duplicator which required typing a dummy, attaching it to the drum and then running copies which was a very stinky process.  Shorthand instead of Dictaphones.  I'm sure our machines were newer than 1930 but the process where I worked in 1960s was much the same.  

No air-conditioning so summer evenings were spent on the front porches and under shade trees.   Lucky people had a screened sleeping porch AND shade trees.   

In our community almost everyone went to one of the three churches on Sundays.  The men wore long-sleeved white shirts, ties and suits, the ladies wore nice dresses with nylons and both men and women wore hats.  The funeral home provided cardboard fans which got a lot of use.  Again, from pictures and my grandparents' stories not much was changed from the 1930s.

In small towns almost everyone physically able had a big vegetable garden and the women canned the produce preparing for winter.  Most kept chickens and some a cow.  My grandparents had a shed at the back of their lot and kept a cow.  The neighbors hired someone to take the cows out after morning milking to graze the roadside ditches during the day, bringing them back for evening milking.

Farms were smaller and there were many more of them, so farm population was significant in Iowa.  Most farms still used horses.  Big steam engine threshing machines would move from farm to farm to do threshing.  Neighbors would gather at each farm to help with the work, and the women would produce mountains of food to feed the workers.  Hay was stacked instead of bailed.   

Most farms were fairly self-sufficient foodwise.  Coffee, flour, spices and sugar were purchased.  Pork, beef, lamb, and chicken were all home raised and processed.   Meat was canned or cured as deep freezers did not exist.  All had a family milk cow, so all milk products were homegrown.  Refrigeration would have been a spring box or a cave.  The original house (before tornado) where I now live had a cistern with a door in the side and a spring in the basement that I assume had been used for refrigeration.  Cooking and heating were wood or coal depending on whether your farm had timber or not.  

Back in the 1930s hardly anyone locked their doors another thing that continued until the 1950s.  Socializing was in homes, churches or lodges not restaurants.  My grandmother that lived on a farm said the neighboring women would gather regularly for an afternoon of visiting.  They might give their group a "club" name and have a small program along with refreshments.  The women of the Depression also listened to the Homemaker radio programs out of Shenandoah, Iowa.  Many small towns had their own baseball team and would play against neighboring towns.  

Children had chores but also lots of imagination making up games and roaming fairly freely with no fears.  In town there was the library and Saturday matinee movies and city park.  Churches had youth groups.  My mother told me that movies were not approved for Sundays but her father let them go on Sunday evenings if they had gone to Sunday School, Church and youth fellowship. 

It was a time when grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins typically lived close by.    Families would visit from the country or even further away on Sunday afternoons.  

Neither of my grandmothers ever learned to drive a car.  My town grandmother would call a grocery order into the store and grandfather would either pick up the order or the store would deliver.  It was quite usual to charge groceries and pay once a month.  

where do you get the nice tea towels? Likely you have had them for ages, but if you have any leads, let me know. I miss old fashioned tea towels. They are so useful in the kitchen!

I am so sad for my grandchildren who are missing out on so much because of technology. Very few things can win against it

I often feel a pull to back off technology use around the Autumn Equinox, and this year is no different.  I’d love to join in and reduce/eliminate screens as much as I can in October.  For me, attempting a more 1930s lifestyle while my family doesn’t, I have to focus my efforts on myself and the time I am in control of for myself.  I can choose to use my phone mostly for phone calls only, but I will text with my young adult children as that is how they communicate.  Just today my youngest checked in with me while helping a friend through a terrible situation — sometimes you need your mom to bolster you up while you bolster up another person.

Luckily, one show we were watching (Return to the Frontier — which we greatly enjoyed despite some obvious issues) just ended, and the other has 3 episodes remaining.  I usually take a break from TV in the fall as much as my family allows, lol.  But in December we watch Christmas movies and specials; my son makes a schedule for us that typically runs from mid-December through Epiphany.  Like others, I considered these types of things to be like going to the movies or listening to radio programs.  My husband and I listened to old radio programs in the 1980s and then again when we had children we would listen to them on satellite radio with our children.

I think even if I am only fully eliminating screens during the day time, I will see a big increase in my available time.

We’re settling into the rhythm of more food production at home.  I’ve baked bread weekly for a couple of months now, and I’ve made soy milk at home for a month.  I bought and shredded 16# of cheese, very gladly using my non-1930s food processor to do the grating and storing it in my very non-1930s deep freezer.  As we do the work we talk about how people used to do food production at home versus buying so many ultra processed convenience foods.  It feels good to bring down our food spending this way, and to know what goes into our food.

We finished August spending $134 under the SNAP benefit level I set for us as a household of three adults (the SNAP amount for our state is lower than the USDA Thrifty and Low Cost plans).  While some categories are reset every month, I’ll be carrying the grocery category forward as I work toward rebuilding my food storage.  We did so much stocking up in August I think we will be able to reduce the grocery budget in time.

Grandma Donna wrote,

Lori B, I bought mine from Amazon several years ago.  I like the narrow double stripe.  I just looked and the ones that I bought and they are no longer available, I checked the specifications on the ones that I purchased.  So do a search for, 100% Cotton Kitchen Towels - Classic Herringbone Tea Towels 2 ply.  There are some look- a -likes, but most of them are thinner.  Find the ones that say 2 ply and also take note of the size.  Some are much too large so in my opinion I do not like anything larger than 27 x 14.  I hope this helps.

Kimberly F, you are doing very good with your grocery budget. :)

Thank you Glenda H_2, for starting off the group comments. 

Stephanie G, I will see about getting some pictures of my menu plan, I actually put them in a real restaurant menu folder and keep it in the kitchen. 

Ann W, I am so happy that you are here in the forum and willing to share so much good information with us.  You have some very good and helpful memories. 

Diana, I have the same feelings about the grandchildren and our great grands.  

I'm having trouble posting tonight.  This is my 3rd attempt. Maybe I'll rewrite my post later.  For now I will say a no tech October sounds like a fine idea. I will use the month to refine my phone use.

Just to clarify, are we taking the month off of all electronics, or do we get radio shows and going to the movies and telephones? During the Civil War, it was common to make ink from poke berries. If it's no telephone, I'd be happy to make some poke berry ink for writing my letters. :) :) There are some berries developing right now on my pokeweed. 

Ann W, I think people got together more in the past because that was their entertainment. 

Stephanie G, I’m considering what it will look like for me.  I won’t give up texting with family members because for us that’s the equivalent of writing letters or making phone calls — it connects us.  The phone is also my camera.

I plan to give up the use of the computer for almost everything I can do another way.  I’ll read paper books, paper magazines, and either find a way to read the paper newspaper for free or I’ll avoid news and find out from my husband.  I won’t be using social media or looking at blogs — Grandma Donna taking a break for the month of October will make that part of it much easier!  I’ll use cookbooks for recipes if I need them, plus my own recipe binder.  I think I have a few recipes I probably need to print out.  I’m going to give up my online puzzles even though I do enjoy them, because they are often a gateway to start scrolling the news app where I play them.  I have craft books I can consult for ideas and instructions, but will reserve the right to use YouTube if I get stuck on a stitch or a sewing technique.

By October I should have a good sense of how the solar electricity is running, so my plan is to not check the usage online on a daily basis, although I will probably check it once a week.  I will continue to do my budget online.  I will also use the Costco app to look up grocery prices when I am planning shopping, so I know what to purchase at which stores.

I do use a headset and my phone for white noise music, and I’ll still do that because I want to sleep!  I am weird in that I can’t sleep if I can hear someone breathing — sometimes my own breathing will keep me awake.  Ear plugs alone aren’t enough.  I’ll also use my phone if I need directions somewhere, because that is less expensive than trying to find maps or a street guide, which could be out of date as Thomas no longer makes one for my area — the last one I see printed was 2009.

My family isn’t going to give up their TV watching, whether that’s sports, movies, TV shows, etc.  The nice things is we naturally slow down around mid September anyway, although they watch all of the playoff games for their team.  Often this time of year they choose a series I’m not interested in, because I really get tired of watching TV every night and don’t like the manufacture interest in a TV series just to have something to watch.  But I will join them to watch a movie on the TV occasionally and will consider it going to the cinema.  And if they call me in to watch a final inning, I’ll liken it to listening to the ball game