I have not posted in some time as no one seems to be reading what I write. I do see thousands of people reading some posts - but they all seem to be from places that make no sense and seem to be done by computers not people.
If anyone is out there and actually reading my posts please answer a post - any post, even if you only say hi, just so I know that someone is doing so.
Please.
Yes it has been awhile since I posted. No particular reason other than ennui. Not much exciting is happening nor have I gotten much done.
Husband had a tooth pulled 2 weeks ago and was given medication to avoid an infection – so last week we had to run to our doctor as he was allergic to the medication the dentist had given him. Which of course meant that he spent last week taking meds to offset the allergy problems from the first med. He is feeling better now.
Bought our Thanksgiving turkey last week – a lot of turkey for 2 people! Went out later in the week after I wrote a list, of course) to buy the other items needed for Thanksgiving dinner and fill in a few items we were low on in general.
Now I have to clear out our dining room so we can have dinner there next week. It is filled with our excess food storage due to still being concerned about Covid and its coming back now that it is getting fcold again and people will be inside more. I will say this is always a problem since it is the least used room (other than general walking through to the rest of the house from the kitchen/den/basement and getting/storing excess food items in it) in the house.
What are your Thanksgiving customs? My husband and his family used to go out for Thanksgiving dinner, while my family ate same at home or at one pair of my grandparents. It used to be “our holiday” - the one when we had both families come to us for dinner. (This stopped as did most of our normal activities when we had bed bugs.) Being of mixed religions we picked Thanksgiving to make as “our holiday to have everyone over” as it is the only one which both families celebrate.
Thought of the week -
Do you have people in for Thanksgiving or other holidays or do you eat out? Come on – someone must be reading this as I see the number of people who have done so rising all the time – answer me and let me who is out there!
No matter whether you do or don't, a Happy Thanksgiving next week.
Well, at least I made it back here in when I am suppose to do so.
Our area got hit with a huge rain storm the end of last week. We do live on an island – though it is so large we sort of tend to forget that it is an island from day to day. (How big? There are 4 counties on the Island – two of them are part of New York City – which is almost half the counties in same as there are 5 counties which make up NYC.) We live in a county which is not part of NYC.
We live on a fairly main road. We knew a large rain storm was coming and we made plans to stay in the house for the day. During the day we looked outside a number of times and all we saw was a good sized rain storm. At dinner time we put on the local news while we ate. We were surprised to see/hear about how much flooding there had been on the Island from the storm. Where I grew up was close to the south shore of the Island and we did get a flooded basement there from time to time (two worst cases were Hurricane Ida in the early 1960s a couple of years after we moved in and Superstorm Sandy recently shortly before mom moved out). But our house here is about halfway between the north and south shores and in the all decades we have lived here – we have not had water in the basement and the only time we saw flooding in the street was Sandy. Husband grew up nearby and we had an apartment nearby before our house so we are talking about somehere over 60 memories of storms in this area.
I still have memories of when I was maybe 7 years old and the basement in my parents was flooded from Donna – I remember looking down the stairs (too deep water for me to be allowed down in the flood) and watching my toys float past. When we took mom to see the house after Sandy we opened the door to the basement and seeing the items floating in the basement – major memories from Donna came “floating” past.
Since we don't get flooding in our house it did not occur that us to even check for same. On the TV, we were seeing flooding in the streets and houses near where I used to live and other places along the north and south shores of the Island. Late in the evening I went down to take up the laundry I had washed and dried the night before and forgotten to take up and fold and I saw a rivulet of water from the wall of the basement to almost husband's work table along the wall of that room in the basement. I quickly checked the spots in both rooms which might have flooded or be wet and all was okay. I was trying to figure out where the water came from – AHA! We have a small (about 4”x 4”) door in the wall of the basement behind the chimney which is used to clean out and check the chimney behind it. The water had come in around the bottom of the door and dripped down. We dropped pieces of paper towels over the wet spots to soak up the water and left the basement.
On TV news the next day we found out that there had been flooding in our area. Pictures of streets filled with water deeper then the curb – people showing their flooded basements – with more water coming in. The next main road of the size of our street was flooded – we are often on that street and we saw the property around the library there (recently expanded and redone over several year) and at the gas station we go to, as well as the areas around these places – we were shocked that such a short distance had made such a bid difference in the amount of water on the street. We have wondered if the sewer drains there were backed up for some reason.
THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -
One never knows when Mother Nature will reek havoc somewhere. After the first hurricane had hit my family's home nothing of value was kept low to the basement floor – in case of flooding again. My parents also found out that there was connection to the sewer in the basement which should have opened before the storm to help get rid of any water that came in.
Always know where you are suppose to go if there is an emergency such as this. Around here it tends to be the school buildings. If you do have to leave your house in a flood or other emergency – bring what you might need for a few days – food, medications, clothing – well charged cell phones, etc. Something to read or for children to play with (that special toy especially) to keep busy. Hopefully you will get the all clear and be able to return to an intact home – but as is said – better safe than sorry. When you leave your house for an emergency such as this make sure that your lights and gas are off also.
Hopefully you will never have this problem, but better to be prepared than not. (How the heck can I get a few hundred stuffed and other teddy bears into our vehicles to take with us in an emergency?)
I don't intend to post monthly instead of weekly it just has been happening lately. My apologies.
We had a reenactment event a week or so ago and having not done an event in awhile it took a bit of work to remember what we needed and to get everything we had to bring together to do so.
We have two other events coming up in October. For one of the events I need to put together a talk on period (18th century) needlework as we are each being given a set time for our demonstrations – my work is so close that while people can watch – a crowd cannot do so all at once. So I will be stitching all day as is normal for me at these events and will be able to show work and talk about needlework “back then”.
In the past at some other events (which were for a later period) I had a bag of various types of embroidery and other stitching to show. (I finish stitching pieces, but – especially when I did the project primarily to learn the technique – I often do nothing with the piece after the stitching is finished, which makes it easier to take the pieces to demonstrations.) I could not find the bag in our studio.
In the past the studio was much better organized, but since the start of Covid it – and especially my work table – has become the storage area for excess canned goods and such. Add into this the fact that we had taken apart my family home when mom moved elsewhere and I have a number of bags – similar to the bag I used to bring to events – with embroidered pieces – finished and unfinished – back to when I was a young girl. So gathered together all of these bags and took them to the living room. I sorted through them – finished or unfinished being one of main sorting criteria. While I never the bag with items I expected to find together I did get to see a history of my (and my husband's) needlework.
The pieces are now sorted – mine or his, mine by year of work or type of stitching. Unfortunately they are still taking up much of our living room in stacks. I will sort through for what is usable for this event and then figure out how to better store them. I have not really been able to work with them as our living room also serves as husband's “loom room” for his, well, loom which is setup in the room for him to work on a piece. (Yes, our house has very unusual purposes to many of the rooms.)
THOUGHT OF THE WEEK (OK, MONTH) -
When one has an assortment of old, beloved items to work through it is not easy and will often be put off. First step is to sort the items in some fashion so one can see what they have and decide what to do with them. Obviously in this case donating the pieces is not really a viable solution and the pieces will all be kept – and will serve as history of my and in general needlework of the 1950s/60s onward.
Do you have anything similar – of no value except to you, and possibly posterity?
A bit of a followup to my post of (can it really be this long) over a month ago.
Two weeks after we went to the car dealer and then decided - while at the dealer – not to buy the car and canceled the transaction, we received a letter from a bank denying our car loan. This shocked us for two different things.
First, we know what our credit rating is and it is about as high as one can have.
Second – We had canceled the car purchase – without signing any paperwork for a loan – though the “finance manager” had told us she as entering our info that we had the loan.
We wrote a rather extensive letter to the bank which had turned us down. (One reason given my credit report was locked – something I had done with all of our credit reports long and ago and forgotten about - which makes me wonder why husband's was not locked.) And we told about all that went on that day and we had NOT applied for the loan! Waiting to hear from back from same.
NEXT– LAUNDRY FUN.
I do three loads of laundry most weeks -clothes, towels, and bedding. Dirty clothing, bedding and upstairs towels go in a large laundry bag in our upstairs hall closet. Dirty towels from the kitchen and downstairs bathroom go in a smaller laundry bag which hangs on the basement side of the door to same in the kitchen. I throw the laundry bags into the towels load to be washed weekly. Something I always wondered about happening – happened. The string from the downstairs laundry bag wrapped around the agitator in the washing machine and would not release from it – even after I cut the cord and only left a short piece in the washer. Husband and I finally gave up on getting it released. With much trepidation about the mechanisms in the washer getting the piece of the cord wrapped further around the agitator and breaking the washer completely I kept doing the laundry in the washer. Two weeks later – MAGIC - I found the piece of cord loose in the bottom of the washer – relief!
To prevent this from happening again – even before the piece came loose – I now take the cords out of the bag before throwing the bags in the washer. Yes, it is a bit more work each week – but stops me from worrying about a repeat.
I no longer put the cord in the downstairs bag at all. It is short now (since I had cut off the piece which was stuck) and I knotted the ends together. Short of it being there having been a holiday that week and having used fabric tablecloth/napkins, there is not much put into the bag and the kitchen/bathroom hand towels are relatively small. I have a medium sized safety pin which I use to attach the remaining small, knotted piece of cord to the bag so I can hang up the bag on the hook on the back of the basement door during the week to collect the laundry in it.
I have a large safety pin which I use to push the cord through the channel of the larger, upstairs bag so I can hang the bag on the 3 hooks in the closet which hold the bag open to make it easier to throw the dirty laundry in the bag.
Yes, it is more work than before – but having worried for 2 weeks about the possibility of having to repair our washer if the cord wrapped further around the agitator or needing to buy a new one and the cost and mess involved in doing so.
THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -
If it is not one problem – it is another problem! While both of these problems wasted time, caused great annoyance – they are minor compared to what can happen in life.
Any one have a problem like either one of these – what did you do?
Here's another kind of organizing. We need to buy a new car. Our old car has a problem that develops with this model car and we want to get rid of it before it is too late. We keep looking at what is available. Problem is that cars have changed too much for us since we bought our current car and we want to avoid as much as we can of the changes – such as – we would really like a REAL KEY to the car.
Husband has it down to one particular car and we keep hemming and hawing over it. In addition to not being comfortable with the new cars and the changes in them (our most current car was purchased in early 2013 and the car world has, apparently changed since then) we also have financial limitations on the purchase. In the past when we were both working this was not a problem – as matter of fact we customarily paid for our new cars in full when we purchased them – did not take out a loan. But with our current car and this new car (and our RV) a loan has been needed for convenience of not needing to get out of other assets the money to pay for the car as it would result in income taxes being due on the money taken from same. (Not wealthy, just very prudent at socking away savings from our incomes over the decades before spending was done.)
We had figured that between our trade in (based on values husband saw online) and what we could manage to take out of the bank we would owe about half of the cost of the car.
Since when this model year is over there will be no more key – we went today to a dealer who had the car we wanted. We had a test drive – well husband did, I just rode along with him and the salesman. He liked how it drove – I was a bit concerned that hood sat too high for him, but he said it did not. So we moved along to the messy part – negotiating for the car.
Actually same was rather simple – Dealer employee “This is the cost.” Husband “Okay, how much can you lower that price - it is the full price.” Dealer employee “That is the price – we are “only” charging the MSRP not charging you more than it – charging over same has apparently become the norm (well, it is a suggested retail price from the manufacturer I guess). “Discussion” went on. He can't give us anything lower in price - and the US$1000 plus in extras we don't can't be removed from the car/price. Oh, and our current car which husband had looked up the value of – is only worth half according to them. Price now too high for us. I should explain that we have not technically had “a car” in several decades as we have had what are considered “light trucks”.
The manager came over and would not give us anything at all. We DID not buy the car and will be checking out some of the other local dealers to see what their story is.
THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -
One can plan all one wants – but that does not mean that when one needs to buy something – it will be anything like it was in the past or that the process today will make ANY sense at all. I wonder if we were paying all cash it would be less expensive and an easier process.
While this post circles around an American colonial event of 1776, it is also a general post. I do hope everyone related to same had a good July 4th .
As 18th century reenactors the holiday has a second meaning for my husband and myself. When one spends part of their time “living” in a different time period that time period and participating in events related to it, it take on additional meaning.
Communication being what it was in 1776 the Declaration of Independence most people had no idea that the Declaration had been signed for a week or maybe more. Could you imagine something that momentous today not being instantly available – in great detail – to everyone within minutes today? And it took weeks for England to know about it – even longer for other countries.
Most things took longer then. A housewife and anyone helping her cook (including enslaved people, free servants, and family members) would be awake as early as possible to start cooking – possibly before dawn depending on the time of year. In a most cases the kitchen was a separate building. A fire – in all seasons – as it would need to be started so the wood could burn down to charcoal for use. If the housewife was good at what she did the breakfast would be leftovers from the day before. It was common to cook a meal for “dinner” (at about the time we have lunch). Leftovers from dinner would be eaten for supper that evening. And if the housewife had planned correctly – the food still leftover would be reheated and served for breakfast the following morning. Leftover food could not be stored for anywhere near the time we do so today as it would go bad without refrigeration – depending on location winter would help some with keeping food cold in season. Of course there was no running water so someone was carrying water for cooking and washing – people and things.
A good deal of the food was raised by the individual families – animals for meat, planting in the spring, fishing in nearby water – again it all had to planned out in advance how much would be needed, such as how much wheat would the family need to last until next year's wheat was ready to harvest? What if something happened to the crops and they were lost or bad? How much bread to bake at a time so it would last long enough – but none would go bad? We have been thorough periods in the 20th/21st centuries where we had to go food shopping every day as we had not been planning out what we need for food as the easy and constant availability of same spoiled us. It was much easier for me before husband retired/quit his job a decade or two ago as I could plan my list and plan my time to get shopping done once a week, with an extra run on Friday to fill in if needed – before the weekend and husband was around all day. Since Covid we have been back to figuring out how much food to buy to go out and food shopping the least number of times – and shopping list matching the aisles the items are in to be able to find things as quickly as possible. We tried to keep the food shopping to every 2 months in 2020 – storage of the food a major organizing job on its own. (We are edging back to food shopping much more often as fill in shopping these days.)
When my husband was still working he thought what I did if a bad storm – snow or rain - was mentioned on the news – I would make sure we had a week's food in the house – especially food that did not need to be refrigerated and also food that did not need to be cooked - and all our prescriptions were up to date so we had enough medications for a week or so at the least. I would fill the gas tank in my car. I would do the laundry – even if early – so I knew we would have clean clothing, towels, bedding, etc. Since he has been home all the time and even more so since Covid, he understands what I was doing all along.
THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -
Survival in earlier times depended on the family – especially the wife – planning what foods would be needed when, as well as how to keep the food safely edible and not running out of food. In cold weather the husband and sons would have to make sure there was enough wood to burn for heat and for cooking.
At the start of Covid a bit of all this need for planning came back. As the need for the planning has been disappearing again (though even now, many times food shelves are still partially empty in the supermarket and they are out of foods we planned to buy) we are losing the idea of planning ahead to make sure we are ready for the next emergency – and there will ALWAYS be a next emergency.
Are you planning ahead so that when the next emergency comes – you and your family are prepared? (I am not talking about going to the extent that so called “preppers” do – just that you have food in the house for a short period of time to get started if something happens.)
