How is life treating you all this lovely January Wednesday? And by lovely I mean terrible and yucky. I don't know what the weather looks like in your neck of the woods, but here it's 37 degrees and raining. Which doesn't sound too bad, right? Except this past weekend it snowed 18 inches, and tomorrow it's going back down below freezing. I may end up making hubby stay home from work. That sounds like a great recipe for a broken leg. Actually, it was weather like this that made my sister slip and break a leg several years ago, so I'm not just being paranoid!
Well, I've had an interesting week. We had a 3-day weekend because my hubby gets (some) bank holidays off and didn't have to work for MLK day. However, like I said, it snowed 18 inches this weekend and we mostly spent the weekend shoveling and recovering from said shoveling. The neighbor across the street got stuck in the snow early Sunday morning, and my hubby and two other neighbors went out to help her. It was a really heart warming sight.
It feels really good to have nice neighbors. I often fantasize about living way out in the country with my closest neighbors miles away, but then I remember stuff like this, or sitting on the Petersons' porch in the summer, or petting Heather's cats, or chatting with Charlotte. It's good to have these people in my life, especially since I'm a hardcore introvert and can go days without seeing another person (sans my hubby).
The crazy thing about the snow is that it wasn't even that much for us. It's a big storm, for sure, but not out of the ordinary. I can vividly remember the day we got three feet of snow in one day and we spent almost all day shoveling. The whole town was essentially shout down simply because nobody could get anywhere. Now that was a big storm!
So what else have I been up to? Let's see! It looks like the lettuce in my Aerogarden is getting almost big enough to start picking. With all of the news about contaminated lettuce making people sick, I decided to stop buying it in the store (plus it's expensive for something so low in nutrition and calories, and hard on the environment to ship a bunch of leaves across the entire country just so I can have a leafy salad). The garden cost me an initial investment of $80, but I figure it grows $5 worth of lettuce every week, and lasts about 20 weeks before I need to pull out the lettuce and start again. So that's $100 every time I plant lettuce in it. Not bad!
Speaking of being frugal, I've gotten out my favorite book on saving money and I'm working my way through it for a third time. It's just a fun read, and it inspires me to try a little harder at saving money and being less wasteful.
One of my goals this year is to reduce the amount of waste we generate in our home, including garbage and recyclables. My plan of action to accomplish that goal is to: purchase fewer items in general, stop shopping online so much, make do with what I have, fix things as much as possible, buy used if I really need something, cook from scratch, buy in bulk, and grow my own veggies. I already do a lot of those things, but I'm sure I could be better at them.
On the list of things to be fixed instead of replaced is our kitchen drawers. Our house is 100+ years old and from what I can tell, it's gone through quite a few transformations. One upgrade previous owners made was to put in new cabinets and drawers in the kitchen. However, it was a weird time in history when they did this, because the drawers they installed are plastic? And instead of working like a normal drawer with rails on the side to slide on, the drawer glides on a central monorail? It's such an odd system. And even though the drawers are cracked and some are downright broken, we've never done anything about it because we didn't know how to fix it and we didn't want to replace the entire cabinet system.
So I was poking around the internet last fall, looking at how I could possible fix these beasts, when I saw that there's a company that sells replacement drawer inserts. Yay! I bought them a few weeks ago and we started working on them this weekend. It's turning out harder to do that I thought it would be, but Chad said that's just how all home improvement jobs go, lol. He's probably right.
I've been really getting into my sewing in 2019. I need, NEED to work on my fabric stash. I actually ran out of room to store it, and now I have a bunch of fabric just sitting in a box in my studio. I gotta get this done. The good news is that I have plenty of projects I want to do! Now I just need to make sure I use the fabric I have on hand instead of buying new stuff to finish them.
My latest project is this pretty table runner that I made for my MIL's birthday (shhh, don't tell her).
I ended up using almost all of my purple scraps, and a big piece for the backing! I had to buy the white and greens though. Hopefully I used more than I bought.
I'm gathering up some fabrics to start a quilt for my niece, too. Her birthday is January 17th, so I figure if I start now, I can have it done for her next birthday.
I pulled out a cool book I got at a quilt show. Some lady was selling it for $1 and I grabbed it. The book wasn't complete though (it was one of those block of the month books from the 90s, and whoever had it before me only bought 1/3 of the blocks), so I went on Ebay and bought a complete book for $20. It's such a cool design, and I'm sure I can use the pattern to use up tons of scraps.
Now that my MIL's table runner is all done, I'm going to get back to work on the hexie quilt. This thing is just taking so long! I just started quilting it, and decided that the flowers take 5-10 minutes to quilt, and with 25 stars to quilt, that will take me 125-250 minutes, or 2 hours and 5 minutes to 4 hours and 10 minutes. For a tiny piece! Sigh. That's ok. I'm sure it will be worth it in the end. I quilt because I like it, right?
I have a PC project in the works too, but I forgot to take a picture of it. But I did take this picture:
Now I'm off to work on my 2019 garden plan. Have a good week, everyone!
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