The train

The other morning I was sitting at my desk and I heard the train moving into town earlier than it usually did, I thought about how many things seem to be off schedule.  

When I heard the train, we were getting ready to go up to the lake to drain the pipes at the cottage because the temperatures are expected to drop below freezing.  I snapped this picture from the car window as we were passing by the farm land and I thought about how the crops did not seem to do as well this year and I wondered if our farmers are struggling. I noticed in the places we drive by that the cotton seemed shorter and not as full this year.  I do not know about the peanut crop.  One thing that did look pretty good was a field of sorghum.   We are still holding on to the cottage because we do not know how bad things might get and we are thinking about our family with so many job losses. 

I have been concerned because our medical insurance is going up and since so much has already gone up with the tight budget, where will the money come from without draining our savings?  We have reduced how often we eat meat now so we have leftover grocery money from our grocery budget. 

It is time to get very real about this and very sensible.

When I say that we are worried, or concerned, we are concerned for ourselves, but mostly concerned for others that may not be paying attention or are in debt.  For others that do not have the skills that we have or mostly for the people that are younger than we are and do not have the memories of what life was like long ago and how our grandparents knew how to live a very simple life because they had been through many troubled years. 

So we took some steps to really crank down on our expenses. Sometimes we wonder if there is anything left that we have not already done, but we always manage to find other things. There are things we have done when we needed to save money to have a repair or pay an unexpected expense where we learned what to do.  The history studies have helped us very much.

Wash bowl baths cost less than a full hot shower or tub bath and you can get just as clean, especially if we heat our water as we need it.  We do still bathe but we can take the wash bowl bath in between and not have to take a full bath as often.  I do feel much cleaner with the washbowl bath though, seems better on the skin. 

A hard triple milled soap will last much longer, especially if you keep it on a drainer to keep it dry between uses. 

Everything we do today cost us money.  When we drive anywhere we pay for gasoline.  When we wash our clothes, dishes, cook our meals, turn on a television or computer, it cost money and adds to the amount on the bill so anything that we can reduce can help at least a little.  

We have a wood stove outdoors and we can heat our water and do some cooking on that stove using wood that we pick up from oak or pecan limbs that have fallen. We know when people put their limbs out for city pick up and we can pick up wood that way.  We are not above doing these things, we never want to be without our resources. 

Many young people have no experience or understanding of what things they can do to save money because they have grown up in a time where they have not had the lessons that we had when were were growing up.  We need to be their examples. 

I was dressed in three layers this day I made a cake. 

I have been changing the way that I make baked goods.  I have been converting my recipes to hand mixing with a spoon instead of using a electric mixer. This above is a chocolate cake, now I can sit in my little wooden kitchen chair and use a bowl and spoon to mix my batters when baking and no electric mixer. This is more comfortable for me using my arms and I have issues with dizziness and there is a lot of turning around in the kitchen when making baked goods.

I put all of my ingredients in small cups and have them close by and then just sit and stir in order they need to be. 

 I am not adding to the cost of the ingredients by using electricity to mix this batter. There are many small ways to not spend that add up. When you do many things this way, the savings is greater. Now we are working on how to bake without electricity. 

Of course I would love a kitchen off to the side of the house with a wood burning cook stove. :)  It would need to be off the side of the house because of how hot our area gets in the summer here. I have very fond memories of these stoves.  However,  we do not have a fancy wood cook stove like long ago that made so much sense because it was a water heater, a oven and a cook top all in one, so we are trying to find the next best thing. :)

Today I made potato cabbage soup and cornbread. I could have used  the heat from the oven to heat the house by opening the door to the oven when the baking is done. It was warmer today so the kitchen was not cold.

I put some butter in the chicken butter dish so it would come to room temperature while cooking the potato soup.

We get trapped cold air in our house, so we are monitoring the outside temperature verses the inside temperature and if it is warmer outside we open the windows, this allows the trapped cold air to flush out and be replaced with warm air.  This will change soon when it is cold for longer spells. 

Last year we used our portieres (shown above) over our doorways to control the heating and this summer we used them to control the cooling.  It really does help if we heat or cool just the area that we are in.  We use simple fleece blankets for our portieres over our doorways, this way the pets can still roam through the house instead of closing doors. 

Charles and I are getting older, and this year as the temperatures have been dropping we have been very cold.  We have been trying to find ways to stay warm without running the heat.  A electric blanket cost much less than a heater.  We have the pet warming pads as well so for the past several weeks that it has been cooler and even cold we have been doing this but we realize that we do not have the proper clothing to stay warm enough. 

Last year we wore knitted hoodies almost all winter and that kept us warm.  Here in the southeast U.S. it is not common to find real winter clothing or woolen items so we ordered wool socks and this year those have been wonderful to have. 

 So we decided to purchase two thick flannel shirts, one for Charles and one for me.  

Each of us a pair of thick flannel pajamas, This above is Charles new flannel pajamas. 

My pair of flannel pajamas. 

My new robe, Charles robe has not arrived at this time.  We purchased these online because we could not find what we wanted in stores.  

My Grandmother, my father on the left and his brother on the right. My father experienced many things in his lifetime, his father died from the flu pandemic in 1918, he lived through the great depression and served during war two in the 1940s.  My mother experienced the great depression with little to eat at times and learned how to forge for food from plants that grew naturally. 

You learn what to do when you need to. Since we do not have those that can teach us, we must learn by seeking out the information and then practicing. 

A bucket to soak, a slab to scrub, a bucket to rinse and a line to dry is what it takes to wash clothing using only soap and water. 

It is empowering to know what to do.  Is this for emergencies only, it depends on how important it is to pay our bills and not have any debt. 

For the winter we have gotten out the oil lamps because they produce some heat.  We have learned for our house that we can turn our heat on for half and hour and knock the chill out of the room.  We no longer just let it run and keep the home the same temperature in every room. We heat our home where we need it.  

One of my favorite aprons, it reminds me of a time before electricity and running water in average homes.  It seems to keep me on track.

I have shown this photo many times, my brother in the 1940s.  We started off life in a very simple time and now we are going back to that simple life because it makes more sense.

I mentioned the train at the beginning of the post.  When I hear the train coming through I think about the many stories that I was told about trains during the 1930s and 1940s. When our family members spoke about the trains they had fond memories of the time even though it was during the difficult years.  They spoke of the trip to the worlds fair, a trip to Washington.  Then there was a story about a family member that lived just outside of our town and they lived close by to the train tracks and she would stand by the tracks and catch a ride to downtown Dothan to go to work.  The conductors must have know to look for her.  I often imagine her riding the train into town.  

I do have a question for the forum. Since Charles and I live in the southeast U.S. we wonder about my readers that live in colder climates. I cannot imagine that you would keep the house warm all winter with the cost of electric, fuel, coal or wood pellets.  What do you do to stay warm and what temperature do you try to keep your house?  Do you dress in warm clothing inside the house all day long?  What do you do at nighttime for heat?  

You may wonder why ask such questions but we do not normally get long periods of cold but last year was very different with our unusual snow storm and it is looking like we may get very cold this winter.  I cannot imaging affording heating cost up north since ours is very expensive here with the milder cold here. 

Also those of you that have tips on how to stay cool during extreme heat, this would be good for those of you not in the U.S. that are starting your hot weather season. 

  Grandma Donna