Being present so you can remember

I just did a post under cooking from scratch for my recipe for breakfast muffins, I wanted to do a regular post under living like the past to catch up on a few things. 

Last blog post I talked about not posting for the month of October so I can stop using electronics, including my computer, for the 1930s study.  I am looking forward to this part of the study and I am getting the house more 1930ish.   I turn on more lighting when I take pictures, but when I am not taking pictures I only use the lighting when needed. 

I have not used our clothes dryer at all since starting the study and we are still only cooling the room or rooms we are using during this hot summer.  Our electric bill is the lowest it has been in years, even during all of this hot weather.  

Before I forget to mention, when I use the oven I try to bake other things at the same time.  I baked extra muffins this morning that will be going in the freezer.  I will take them out the night before if we have them that next morning.

The freezer would not have been a part of the 1930s study but what we are wanting from the study is how to cut costs and understand  what it was like during the great depression.  How did they get through.  All of this helps our real budget.

I have been planting for fall the past few weeks and this is a elephant garlic clove.  I have planted a plot of these cloves, also planted some more onions, Kale, turnips, daikon radish, snow peas, lettuce and bok choy.

Sweet potatoes, pork with sautéed onions and broccoli. This is our second week Friday meal. 

Rice topped with chicken with gravy and peas and a side of zucchini. These meals are rotated on our two week menu.  This is a Monday first week meal. 

We can make changes to these meals when we want but the Chicken and rice are set items.  The vegetable can change and what we add to the rice can change. 

A simple breakfast of bananas with cream and a few dark chocolate drops.

We are getting ready for Charles retirement the end of this month of September.  We went to our favorite second hand place and purchased three new old chairs to have extra comfortable seating.  The chair above is a simple occasional chair, does not rock or recline, it sits comfortably.

Charles and I are getting older now and our lifestyle is changing.  We do not have a sofa in our house, nor do we have recliners.  We do have a small loveseat but no lounging types of furniture. We normally are on the move gardening or if Charles is not working he is doing things in his work shop or out in the yard.  I am cleaning, sewing, knitting caring for the pets, there is always cooking and clean up that we both do together now.  So at rest we are either sitting upright in a chair or laying down.  We do take naps now, this is something that we did not used to do. 

We both wonder what our new routine will be since in only a few weeks Charles will no longer drive his car out of our driveway to go to work. 

His list of things to do has become a book called "Preventive Maintenance Schedule". :)  He has been working on this book for many months.  He loves to journal so no telling what kind of routine we will have and if our home will turn into a data library.  We already know when to expect the wax wing birds to arrive and other migrating birds.  We already can look back several years and see what the temperature was on any particular day, as well ,as how much electricity we used in a 24 hour period on June 19th 2019 or any date we want to look at since he has been keeping records.

I often wonder what our neighbors think of us when they see out their windows with Charles in his pajamas and flashlight out in front of our house kneeling on the ground reading the water meter.  He is going to have to come up with a new method though because he has arthritis in his knees and hips now. 

Each morning he makes his rounds in his pajamas before he gets dressed for work.  He reads the water meter, then the electric meter, he then checks the three outdoor thermometers. He checks the rain gages, also for his record book and he observes what is going on with nature, clouds and humidity and makes notations.  Farmers would understand this for sure. 

To cut expenses we are still sleeping in our dining room (you see part of the bed there) and the two other new old chairs we purchased has now made us a new conversation area.  The pink wing back chairs. I did a post on this last year how we turned our kitchen and dining room into a small apartment / flat to save money.  We are still doing this because it has saved us so much money. 

We are excited about the weather changes now because we have opened up the whole house with the exception of a few very hot days the passed few weeks.  Today there is not air conditioning running, a small window fan in the kitchen. 

Charles has taken the first chair there on the right.  The brown folding table in front of the bookcase can be set in front of the loveseat and the DVD player can be put on it and we can watch all creatures great and small.  We have the whole series except the new one coming out. 

Charles loves to read and I love seeing him sitting in a chair reading because it just feels right. He has a book light that charges using solar. In the past that would have been a oil lamp or candles but now we must find ways in this real day and time to get ourselves over the new humps in the road. 

Most any day now there may be some laundry hanging about the house.

In the 1930s people did go to the movies.  Actually through my history studies and my many diaries, I was shocked at how often people went to the movies.  Several times per week, they would go to the movies. 

When we watch a dvd it is our time to go to the movies and it is normally an episode of All Creatures Great and small because that series represents the late thirties and early 1940s. We watch the newer version with Samuel West as Siegfried Farnon.  I love their house / Veterinarian clinic and all of their furnishings, kitchen dishes and laundry items. It just feels right. :)  They do not have television but they do have a radio.  We may have the entire series memorized by the end of next year. :)

We both were starting to scroll on our phones and realized that this is addicting and the more we were doing this the less present we are.

We also noticed that our two little dogs do not like us to look at our phones, even the cats do not like the cell phones.  I have been trying to break this new habit.  

Another very important thing that I have noticed, and the reason that I got off of Instagram,  is that when I use this kind of technology minutes and hours are wasted away taking me away from the things that I need to be doing.  

I see people scrolling a lot and I have found myself scrolling without realizing it.  It seems to me that these devices have been made to intentionally pull us in to this.  This is very concerning and even I now have to break myself from this.  

Then something happened about a week ago that really made me think.  I was talking with my brother on our cell phones, there is only 14 months difference in our ages, and he said to me that he had told his daughter recently that it was time for her to realize that in ten years he and her mother and he named other family members, me as her aunt,  that we would most likely not be here in ten years from now.  Many of us will be gone, passed on.  

I have thought about that and how very important it is that all of us, no matter what our age, young or old, that we do not need to waste our life scrolling and watching electronics, playing games or always using some kind of electronic. 

We have in us talents undiscovered, young and old, even at my age I can still learn something new.  Sometimes we need to look way back in time to find something new and interesting. 

There is real life out there and however much time we have left to be here to be part of how it is supposed to be. 

Everyone is welcome to join in conversation in the forum up in the top of this website.  We talk about all kinds of things and learn from each other.

I do have a few questions being that here on this blog, the readers are from all over the world and I would love to know what do you eat for a normal everyday breakfast?

How many meals do you eat per day?  Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner?

What time of day do you eat your main meal? 

How do you dry your laundry?

What is a biscuit?

Most importantly, what do you consider having tea means? 

You can answer as many as you like to do, I cannot wait to read the answers. :)

Also you can discuss anything else that you would like to bring up. 

Grandma Donna