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I had a good chuckle when I stumbled upon the painting above because…the look on her face was pretty similar to mine this week.
We have been in limbo with our flooring situation since October 29th and have hit delay after delay after delay. I’ve been relatively patient as the months have gone by, but after moving all of our furniture into a POD and then hearing of another delay due to a snow storm…I about hit my limit.
In a moment of desperation, we decided why not, let’s just do the floor demo ourselves! A couple of Youtube tutorials later and we were fairly confident in our abilities. (It really wasn’t hard, even for non-handy people like us.) As a family, we spent Monday through Wednesday doing the work entirely ourselves, getting everything removed and prepped and ready for the flooring team to arrive on Thursday.
And then…even though we were in contact with our estimator early in the week and he knew exactly what we were doing, there was still some sort of miscommunication and the person sent out on Thursday was for demo! The poor guy came in and looked around so confused, ha! Anyway, we had to be put back on the schedule for the installers and they wouldn’t be available for almost a week.
It’s funny to look back at my 2025 goals and the virtues I wanted to work on in the new year. Ask and you shall receive! Oh well. We’ll just continue rolling with the punches, hoping we grow in patience and perseverance along the way. We’ll have floors…someday.
Hoping to document 52 weeks of good things!
Five Good Things…
- Doing the flooring removal ourselves. // We felt like we were on a HGTV show! We also saved $3,000, learned a new skill and even discovered a new interest for one of my sons. (Maybe general contracting is in his future?)
- Six years with our dog, Lucy. // She is a joy and we can’t imagine life without her.
- Warm temperatures that melted the snow within two days. // We are pretty done with this relentless winter!
- Starting my “handmade Christmas” challenge. // I purchased the “Christmas Lights” pattern by Stitch With Coffee and am stitching 2 over 1 (two threads over one square) – tiny! It’s turning out so cute.
- A plan to organize our deep freezers. // More details once I acquire the supplies, but I’m excited to bring some order to chaos.
Frugal Accomplishments //
- frogged a discarded knitting project to use the yarn in a different way
- used a scrap fabric for the ornament cross-stitch
- refreshed my white bed quilt using Oxyclean (thanks to the prompt on February’s bingo board!)
This Week in the Liturgical Year //
February 10 was the Feast of Saint José Sánchez del Río, Martyr.
To Read: The young Mexican who gave his life for Christ the King
To Add to the Library: Saint José: Boy Cristero Martyr, Saints and Sinners in the Cristero War: Stories of Martyrdom from Mexico and Mexican Martyrdom: Firsthand Accounts of the Religious Persecution in Mexico 1926-1935
To Watch: Looking at Heaven: The Life of St. José Sánchez del Río
To Copy in the Commonplace Book: ¡Viva Cristo Rey!
Reading //
- Humane Learning in a Machine Age: A Professor’s Resolutions from Dr. Ben Reinhard at Hearth & Field // “We will have to move more slowly on this model: to read fewer works, but read them more deeply; to write less, but invest more in what we create. This seems to me an acceptable tradeoff. As we enter the machine age, the goal of introductory humanities coursework is no longer to teach close reading or the Western literary tradition, but something more fundamental: how to be human.”
- C. S. Lewis, Peter Kreeft, and the sequence: truth, goodness, and beauty from Jeffrey Wattles at Universal Family
- From Gourmet Pork to Subsistence Farming: Why Buellton’s Winfield Farm Will Stop Raising Mangalitsa Pigs in Favor of Sheer Survival from Matt Kettmann at Santa Barbara Independent // “At a time when supporting honestly raised, regionally grown, sustainably minded food is on the lips of every self-respecting restaurant lover, why is it essentially impossible to make a stable living off of working the land?” A blog post for another day, but these questions are frequently being asked here at our farm too.
- The challenge: Avoiding the grocery store from Bruce Steele // “The challenge, To stop eating anything storebought. To see how long you can go on foraging , dry provisions from last years garden, preserves from your own trees or foraged fruit. And of course the garden.”
New Additions to The List //
- A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food by Will Harris
- Politics by Aristotle
Watching/Listening //
- Lessons 1-2 (on George Orwell’s 1984) in the “Totalitarian Novels” course from Hillsdale College
- How I Turned Over 300 Scraps into a Beautiful Quilt in 1 Day from Sew Easy by Sandy
Loving //
- The Last Homely House Youtube channel // Her voice is so soothing and her projects are inspiring. She reminds me of a British version of my grandmother!
from the archives…
WEEK SEVEN 2024 // Patience