The Big White Farmhouse

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The painting above is a little blurry and the exact details are unclear (is that a woman?  is she in a cemetery?), but I felt the emotions evoked deep in my soul this week.  It’s that “fall on your face in front of Our Lord” exhaustion where you’ve clawed your way to the weekend!  Anyway, it is done, we survived and God’s mercies are new every morning.

I’ve been slowly reading The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise by Cardinal Robert Sarah and this piece of advice seemed timely for me:

The silence of everyday life is an indispensable condition for living with others.  Without the capacity for silence, man is incapable of hearing, loving, and understanding the people around him.  Charity is born of silence.  It proceeds from a silent heart that is able to hear, to listen, and to welcome.  Silence is a condition for otherness and a necessity if one is to understand himself.  Without silence, there is neither rest nor serenity nor interior life.  Silence is friendship and love, interior harmony and peace.  Silence and peace have one and the same heartbeat. (p.32-33)

Here’s to finding little pockets of silence in the midst of this loud and messy life.

Hoping to document the abundance around me all year long!

Around here, abundance looks like…

+ working together (multiple times) to get a silly pig back into her paddock.  I swear…with every turn of the season, pigs always decide to get a wild hair and run amok around the property!

+ learning a tip for keeping sweaters looking great.  I wish I had saved the Youtube video, but the woman basically shared how any sweater made with acrylic or nylon or polyester will quickly look worn out.  She said your best bet would be to look for 100% cotton or wool because they hold their shape longer and are less likely to pill or show wash wear.  Two of the three sweaters that I just purchased on ThredUp were 100% cotton, so I’m anxious to see if this tip holds true this winter.

+ completing more small tasks for the Weather the Storm Challenge and feeling more motivated than ever.  When we were getting gas one afternoon, we overheard the gas station owner warn that we could see another $1-$1.50/gal increase by the end of the year.  This would be pretty devastating financially for us (as we live in the country and my husband has quite a work commute) so I’m already thinking of ways to get ahead now in case the owner’s prediction comes true.  This week, I:

• used the weekly grocery store ad to buy peaches, blueberries and russet potatoes on sale
• purchased five canned goods to put back for winter (diced tomatoes and soup)
• sold eggs to friends
• counted up and wrapped change to deposit at the bank
• fixed a small crack in my dustpan with duct tape
• listed a few items on ebay/Poshmark/Pango
• cooked two whole birds for dinner and then used the carcasses to make broth
• froze that broth into Souper Cubes (creating a stockpile for winter soups and stews!)
• added food scraps and toilet paper rolls to the compost pile
• turned off the A/C and opened the windows

+ getting paint on the back hallway walls.  After a ridiculous amount of research, I decided to go with Benjamin Moore’s Simply White for the trim and Ballet White for the walls.  I had them color matched at Home Depot and spent most of Saturday getting to work.  The walls themselves aren’t perfect and I already know I need to re-sand a few places and repaint, but…progress!

+ selling seven unneeded items for the Car Loan Payoff Plan: seven books.  After shipping and fees, I made $15.84.  A slow week.

Reading //

• How to begin a letter-writing habit from Shannon Hood at Of Permanent Things // “We are drowning in electronic communication–much of it is meaningless, and very little of it is of lasting value. None of it is tangible. I write letters because they embody all of the best aspects of communication. Letters are meaningful, intimate, private, tangible, and worth holding on to.”
• It Pays To Be Cheap from Addison Del Mastro at The Deleted Scenes // Food for thought and the comments are great too.
• The Prophets of Technocracy from Dr. Ben Reinhard at Hearth and Field // “I suspect that the difficulties encountered by educators can be replicated, with small modifications, in every profession and every state of life: rejecting, as far as we are able, the empty glamours of the technocratic age, asks more of us than we might suppose. It does not mean returning simply to the status quo ante of 2019, or 2010, or 1993, but a radical re-examination of what it means to be fully human. In pursuit of this, every moment, every action, every thought clawed back from the reign of the Machines is something to celebrate; every moment yielded to them should be an occasion of regret, if not outright repentance.”

New Additions to The List // 

• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks

Watching/Listening //

• Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos from Frontline PBS // An eerie documentary to watch as I read The Every by Dave Eggers.
• Lectures 1-3 of George Orwell: A Sage for All Seasons on The Great Courses // Did you know George Orwell is actually a pseudonym?

Loving //

• D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths // I’m reading this with my little boys and we are all really enjoying the crazy stories.
• this english muffin bread recipe // Makes two loaves and holds up to sandwich making.  I always omit the sugar and you can’t taste a difference.

P.S. Something seems to be wrong with my posts being delivered to email inboxes.  I’m looking into the situation and may have to find a new program.  So sorry for the inconvenience.

This post contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission of any sale made at no extra cost to you.

I’ve been really interested in current economic news lately, but this week I decided to turn off most of the noise.  I’ve got a handle on the problem now – I don’t need to beat a dead horse over and over again by scaring myself silly with worst case scenarios.  It’s time to get to work and carry on with my ordinary days!

And in a world where some new catastrophe happens almost daily, ordinary days at home seem like a privilege and a gift.  Some ordinary things from this week:  A slight chill in the air as we go out for morning chores, hinting at autumn hopefully just around the corner.  Homemade bread made on a regular rotation.  Refereeing sibling squabbles.  Stacks of freshly folded laundry.  Weeding my overgrown jungle of a garden.  A fun and productive school week.  Climbing into bed at the end of the day with a good book.

Hoping to document the abundance around me all year long!

Around here, abundance looks like…

+ creating a DIY Anne Shirley “boxed set” of books for my daughter.  A brand new set would have cost around $60 so I scoured the used book sites to cobble together a matching set for less than $25!

+ chipping away at tasks for the Weather the Storm Challenge and feeling happy with the results so far!  I keep telling myself that small steps eventually lead to something bigger, even if it doesn’t feel that way in the moment.  This week, I:

• used the weekly grocery store ad to buy mandarin oranges, fresh mozzarella, and trash bags on sale
• made multiple loaves of homemade bread
• sold eggs to coworkers
• made more granola (with a little less brown sugar this time…you couldn’t tell the difference)
• listed a few items on ebay/Poshmark/Pango
• logged into my local trash nothing group to see what was available (nothing useful yet)
• picked up a special laundry detergent for my boys’ athletic wear to keep them fresh and in good shape (thanks for the tip, Torrie!)
• re-instituted “Refrigerator Cleanout Night” once a week to use up all the random bits/leftovers
• used up a container of instant coffee and a free shampoo sample
• ordered a few sweaters and fall/winter dresses during a sale on ThredUp
• saved the ThredUp tissue paper to reuse for my reselling orders
• researched high yield savings accounts

+ being a team with my husband.  What a blessing to know that in times of feast or times of famine, we’re a united front against this crazy world.

+ trying out new curriculum and so far, so good!  I’d planned to write a separate post about this weeks ago, but time escapes me.  Instead, I’ll just list them here:

• the Story of Civilization series, starting with Volume 1, The Ancient World
• Memoria Press Geography II, which covers Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Oceania, & the Americas
• IEW’s Fix-It! Grammar (we’re using the Robin Hood book)
• Imitation in Writing’s Greek Myths and Fairy Tales
• Logos Latin 1
• a subscription to The Great Courses (a splurge, but took advantage of a “Buy Two Years for the Price of One” sale)

+ selling nineteen unneeded items for the Car Loan Payoff Plan: fifteen books, three pieces of clothing and a piece of homeschool curriculum.  After shipping and fees, I made $75.67!

Reading //

• A Divine Comedy We Can Feel in the Pulse from Jason M. Baxter at First Things
• Beatrice and the Siren from Kyle Janke at Memoria Press // “Should pleasure define our sense of beauty or should beauty define our sense of pleasure?”
• Strength To Stay from Carla Galdo at Hearth and Field // “It’s not being strong to run away from the things you don’t feel like doing. Actually, it takes more strength to stay, to do what you’re supposed to do — especially if it’s small and insignificant, especially if you can think of a million other things you’d rather be doing.”
• Capturing the Light of Christ: A Picture Study from Denise Trull at Theology of Home // I LOVED this.
• Locusts from Haley Baumeister at Ekstasis // “even darkness is not dark to you, even locusts cannot ravage all, covered in that merciful radiance, we will never be put to shame”
• Italy is a hotbed of volcanic activity from Devika Rao at The Week // Have you heard about this??

New Additions to The List // 

• The Priest Is Not His Own by Fulton J. Sheen
• Absent in the Spring by Mary Westmacott (really Agatha Christie!)
• The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey

Watching/Listening //

• Planning and Storage when you only shop 6 times a year / every two months – Off Grid Australia from Our Small Footprint // Love listening to the different ways people shop/save money.
• Tim O’Brien interview at National Endowment for the Arts // “So the goal of The Things They Carried is to- in large part, is to make readers feel something of what I felt all those years ago and after returning from the war, in a way that a 30 second clip on CNN can’t and doesn’t aspire to; the way a newspaper story is not going to make you feel what it is to be frustrated by never being able to find the enemy and man after man die and another man die and another man lose his legs and you can’t find anything to shoot back at. And you don’t believe in the war anyway. There’s a feeling of frustration and where’s God and why am I here? That goes beyond argumentation and it goes beyond nonfiction. It goes to our nightmares and our human both our human aspirations and our human fears.”
• Mike Rowe & Scott Mann: No One Is Coming To Save You | The Way I Heard It // The conversation around storytelling was surprisingly and wonderfully similar to Tim O’Brien’s thoughts in the interview above.  So good.

Loving //

• these sketch books // Great quality and they come in a pack of three.
• glazed cinnamon scones // My daughter whipped these up – delicious!
• the art of Fritz von Uhde // from the article above by Denise Trull: “He created several unique paintings where he placed Jesus physically, and quite naturally, within the domestic lives of poor and humble people. What would Jesus be doing if we could actually see him there among us?”