The Big White Farmhouse

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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?”