We are starting to feel the cool down, I know it will go back up and then back down until we get cold but Autumn is finally felt.
This post is to let you know that I am going to take a break from my blog. I have so many things to do with the fall garden, still cleaning from the Hurricane, I am doing a few things for a friend that has had a health change.
I have the ongoing water study which is now being combined with the electric use study. New planning for the fall winter menu. I hope that many of you are finding the things that you want to study to help improve our lives. I truly feel that researching what our generations before us did in their homes and how they lived give us a helpful perspective.
I need a break from electronics to clear my head and rest my mind so I can dig in to getting more like the past and still have a comfortable home. Electronics does not go with this kind of life.
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When I want to get back to basics I often look back at my brothers baby pictures where he is wearing his little cotton shirt and the old fashioned cloth diaper with diaper pins. The other picture that I look at is the washbowl that my mother used to bath us with a simple bar of soap. Today baby life has an exhausting amount of baby things. Babies had a much calmer life when my brother and I were babies and those before us. Now my brain feels it is always overloaded with too much information.
Sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair watching nature was the best thing in the world.
I have so many want to do's that I cannot settle my brain.
This week I am not allowing myself to use the washer or dryer, we are watching our kilowatts drop. Now we are trying to figure the best way to see how many kilowatts our hot water heater is using verses the stove burner and the kettle.
Studying these things are a bit tricky because we use them differently on different days but we will get our results somehow.
If I could just figure out how to put a gadget to slow the water when needed. I will look to see if they have come up with anything new.
Charles has been trying to organize his shop. He has changed some of his tools to have tools that can be recharged on the solar generator. This is good but he also really wants to go back to his old hand tools and some that my father and his father left him.
This is what makes it difficult to live more like the past, we really need just the old way but then there are those new items that just make sense too.
I think that it is all about what we are wanting from all of this. Ours is we really want to live without everything we do to cost to cost us to use it. We also want the calm we get from doing things slower and by hand because it feels so right to do this.
We miss our Bunnies Sugar and Cookie, they gave us droppings for our garden and we did our best to give them good food, water and a large place to play. They built their hay tunnels and ran and hopped on their ramps. We collected their droppings, then put the droppings into the composting worm bins and that made really good food for the garden. They lived longer than bunnies usually live so I feel they were happy while they were here, we rescued them from the humane society. You do not have to compost bunny poo but the way we did this worked out very well.
With the cost of fertilizer today this is a consideration for us to do again.
I will be wondering how you all are doing, and you have an idea of what I will be doing too. I hope that you will take some special time for yourself.
I do not know how long I will be away from the blog, this might be longer than last years break which was the full month of October. It depends on how caught up and rested I feel which doesn't sound like that those two words go together. It also depends on how settle to the old way I get.
I write this blog to share life experiences from the past, what I learned from my grandparents and the things my older generation shared with me. Charles and I love doing living history studies and sharing them with you. I think that it is important that we learn the old skills that our generations before had because we never know what is before us. Sadly these older generations are passing away so we are left what the older folks today can share what they know if they had lived the old way.
The internet does help us in some ways such as researching the old newspaper microfilms. Then there is the library.
I do see that some of our younger adults are showing interest in how things were before all of this today. Their bodies must be telling them that today does not feel right. Some are trying to get themselves more rural, and I would love to see more small farms started. I do hope this happens, small farms are what helped many people survive the great depression and all that was before them and for awhile after. Some of my older family members shared their experiences. Today if we cannot have a farm, it is helpful to grow a small garden even if it is a porch garden.
I will keep the forum open today October 22 and October 23 if you want to make any comments and then close the forum but the blog will be up to read old posts. I will close the forum early around noon u.s. central time on October 24 so I make to all the time zones.
Hugs and Love, Grandma Donna
