Being Mindful

This is Carley,

I give names to plants, birds, squirrels, items in our home and most anything, even our car.  It makes life interesting.  

Being mindful can mean being present, conscience of our actions, being aware of our actions and feelings.  The other day I was dusting Carley, I could have walked up to her and just dusted her and put her back on the top of the chest of drawers but I did not.  I walked up to her and said, "Hello Carley, how are you feeling today"?  I said, "Let's get a good clean up".  Because of this I paid attention to the details of cleaning her ears and the crooks and nannies.  

We have plenty to be grumpy about these days but we have a choice of being miserable or making the area we live a true refuge.  

I asked Carley which position she would like to look and fiddle with her position until I felt she was happy.  

This is a much better mindset but there is more to this.

I choose a romantic look about the house.  I am now old and wrinkled but that does not mean that my mind is old.  I like to make ordinary days special.  We all have the same ability to do these things.  If you do not have pretty things to use, we can make them or find them at the thrift for very little money.  It is shocking to me some of the beautiful things we can find at a thrift store.  

This day I took a moment and removed the butter from the wrapper and placed a few pieces in this pretty dish.  

Being mindful is being deliberately aware of the present moment.   If we can get ourself to where we can be mindful of everything we do, think of the change we can make in our home, in our life.  

If we do everything that we do with this thought of how special everything is, we can bring joy to most anything we do.  When others are trying to pull us down to their level we don't have to go there with them.  This is our journey, and even though we have many responsibilities that may not be a lot of fun to do, we can make these things better by considering, how can I make this not be such a dreadful task.  

Name the toilet brush Petunia or something else and speak to her as if she is waiting there ready and eager to help you.  Talk to her as you are using her to clean and thank her for a wonderful job.  Now right about now you may be thinking, this is a bit far but think again, next time you clean the toilet you may just remember me writing this. It is better than being a grumpy butt or just going about your work in a numb state.

I have been in the kitchen working on my new hub.  In other blog posts I have mentioned that  I am short and my kitchen has been getting difficult more difficult to navigate.  Seems I have gotten shorter as I have aged and it has been very difficult for me to reach the things I need to cook and serve a meal. 

I have brought the items to me, arranged a cabinet to but up to the backside of the bar and Charles put a shelf on there for me to put my frequently used bowls and measuring cups and such for baking and cooking.  I have added jars of frequently used dry goods.  

I am enjoying these changes and especially not having to climb up on the stool as often.  

When we repainted the kitchen a few weeks ago we pulled out the stove to paint behind it.  There was quite a bit of dust and greasy mess on the walls and this led me to getting a large flat calendar to start a maintenance schedule.  We decided that we need to pull the stove out twice a year to clean behind and under the stove.  So every six months we will be doing this now.  When we do the stove, we will do the same with the washer and dryer.  

We must do this because if we do not it will have quite a mess to clean up, when is the last time you have cleaned under or behind your appliances?

Solving these problems has led us to solving other problems so that we can keep taking care of our home and doing the every day things we need to do.  

I will enjoy making some bowl coverers for these items on the new shelf but I use them often so there should not be much of a problem with dust and if there is I will just clean it more often.

There are a few other issues that we solved.  

Our issue with making our bed.

I had no problems changing sheets and making the bed.  Not until we purchased a new mattress a couple of years ago.  The new mattresses have gotten much taller and they require deep pockets.  I struggled to change the sheets due to the weight of the mattress and so I had to ask Charles for help. 

Each time we changed sheets we both struggled.  So we purchased a topper, and yes that made it thicker but it solved our problem.

Now we simply put the top fitted sheet on the foam topper.  Ours is a 4 inch topper.  We put a fitted sheet on the mattress but we do not need to change that very often because it does not get dirty.  It serves more like a box spring.  We do not have a box spring,  Charles built a frame and put some plywood on top and our mattress sits on that.  We would not have done that if the bed was not too tall but it was necessary.  Now our backs are not going out from changing sheets anymore. 

This is how it looks after putting the fitted and top sheet over the topper.  You can see on the floor just under the bed the corner of Elizabeth's doggie bed for nighttime.

Charles is almost finished with the reinforcement of our hallway.  Since storms are getting stronger we decided to put in a double ceiling and wood walls over sheetrock.  Charles added metal brackets to stabilize the wood in the ceiling to the original 2x4's so now there are two strong ceilings.  I do not know if this would help during a tornado but we do not have a storm shelter and the hallway has a lot of doorways and frames and seems to be the best place to be in a storm.  

We are going to leave it natural wood and not paint it because it looks nice this way.

This week he is making a second door that goes into the attic that will have a strong hold should we have a strong storm. Let's hope not....

We had an enjoyable pasta night the other evening with garlic bread and a simple tomato, fresh basil from the garden and parmesan topping.  

For Independence Day, we had hotdogs, potatoes and onion bake and we studied early history of the United States and learned how and why Washington DC / District of Columbia got their names and why it is not a State in the United States.  This led us to many other historical things to learn about and very fitting thing to do on Independence Day on the fourth of July. 

One other little tip that we are doing now.  This is small little quilted / cross stitch spread I found several years ago at a thrift store for $2.00.  

Since Charles has retired and we are much older now we are starting to require naps.  So when we make the bed we add this little spread over the bottom of the bed for our sock feet.  At the top of the bed the two top pillows are our reading pillows, the front pillow is for our middle pillow for our elbows when we are reading , under those is our head pillow and now when I make the bed I lay a pillow case, just the pillow case across the top of that pillow for our head leaving our night pillows clean.  

This way we can just lay down to read or nap and not mess up the bed. We simply straighten up the bed.  At night we remove the flat pillowcases and fold them and put them on the sewing machine at the foot of the bed and are there for when we make the bed the next day.    Just a little tip of what we do to keep the bed made, even if we lay down to nap or read.  

The garden is still making beans, cucumbers, eggplants etc.  Only a few tomatoes this year and squash did poorly and our new news is we had two bees to arrive a few weeks ago, Bumble and Bill, and this week it looks like some of their friends and family may be arriving.  I hope so because we have just started planting seeds for our fall garden.  Even though the season of Fall is quite a ways off, it takes a long time for some vegetables to grow from seed to transplant.  

If you are going to garden remember to look on the seed pack and find out how long it takes from planting seed to harvest.  Then find your first or last frost dates and count on the calendar how many days it will take until harvest so you will know when to plant.  

Example: Cherokee purple tomatoes take 105 to 120 days from the time you plant the seed in the ground until you harvest.  Our first frost in fall date is around November 11th and 20th.  

When I count backwards I find that I need to plant these seeds before July 30th, so they need to be planted around second week in July.  This way if there is an early frost we have a two week buffer. If the tomato is an indeterminate tomato that means that it will keep making tomatoes.  A determinate tomato means that it will grow to a determined height and set all of its fruit and ripen within about a two week span.  

A Cherokee purple tomato is indeterminate which means that it will make fruit longer. I normally would not plant this tomato for fall but our spring tomatoes did poorly because we purchased two from the nursery.  I will seed these because I have always had better results with them when I plant seed.  

I have decided to plant my seeds now that we are in July right away just in case we get a good crop.  I am also replanting Cucumbers now as well and in August I will plant some seeds again for succession planting to keep the vegetables growing throughout the summer. 

If it doesn't work the first time, keep trying :)

Charles and I have started trying to have more of a routine here at home.  We are trying to live much more old fashioned as well, especially with electric and water use but other things too such as less waste and we have changed to glass storage for our freezer that is freezer safe glass to stop buying plastic bags.  We decided to invest in the glass since the cost of freezer zip bags have gone up.   

This is Finley, my daughters fish and he has quite a personality.  I just wanted to share his cute picture she sent me.  

This Independence Day gave me time to pause on the word Independence.  If we take the word literally we understand it gives us the freedom to live our life, make our own decisions, and name our toilet brush if we want to.  

I choose to be mindful, especially of others, present in the moment, and be cheerful so that we do not pull others down. Imagine life if we can find something good in everything we do. When we wash dishes we slow down and not hurry the job to just get it over with but notice our hands and how they work, notice the patterns in the dishes.  When we make our bed, we take care in the way it looks, when we wash our laundry notice anything that might need mending, and when we fold these items we are thankful that we have and learn to take better care of these things we have.  This brings us to a calm level of intention. 

Our bodies are stressed today and we can need to find our peaceful place and that place often is inside of us, not external. 

I bumped up posting this blog post because I said I would post on First and Third Monday's of the month.  Since we have people from around the world it is already Monday in some areas so I will go ahead and publish this post to include you that are already Monday.  

For the forum

Do you have any special tips that you do at your home that helps make things easier?

Have any of you extended your growing seasons to grow food or flowers?

Do you have any tips for feeding your plants during this time of expensive fertilizers and shortages?   

Let us know what you have been up to since last post.  We can talk about anything but politics in the forum, we have good conversations that helps us learn from each other. 

Hope to see you soon, 

Grandma Donna