Happy Valentines Day friends! I hope you had a good day no matter how you celebrated. We’re very low key here for holidays. I like to hang up decorations to enjoy, but there aren’t really any gifts exchanged. Every day is a gift, I suppose. But we did do some fun things over the long weekend. Saturday we went to the local farm where we purchase our meat and stocked up on some more meat. I think that was our Valentine’s gift to each other. It’s practical, but also makes me feel good knowing we have a good stockpile. I’ll talk about some of the other stuff we did on Saturday in a few.

On Sunday I had my first book group meeting of the new year. It was fun! I had a new-to-me participant and I enjoyed the discussion. I’ll pick the next book today or tomorrow and get that out so you have plenty of time to join me for next month. We’ll do the second Sunday of the month at 10AM. Stay tuned for deets. The rest of Sunday (Valentines Day) was spent visiting with the Mister’s family and getting things done. We haven’t seen his family since Thanksgiving so we did a socially distanced visit. They also brought a load of our stuff down. If you recall, we’ve had most of our stuff stored at their house for the past three years (some of it had been stored in the barn for way longer than that. And when COVID shutdowns happened, I made several trips back and forth cleaning out the barn. Now we’re on to getting the things that have been stored in their house).

Anyway, it was fun going through the couple of boxes they brought down. I had actually forgotten about most of the items. They also brought a box of stuff that I thought I had lost. I have all these Krinkles ornaments that I purchased years ago but ‘lost’ the box they were in. But it had been in storage at their house and they brought it with them and when I opened it I told the Mister he needed to call his Mom because that wasn’t my stuff. It had been so long that I had totally forgotten about it. Long story short, they said it was indeed our stuff! Score! It’s mostly Christmas decorations so it will be fun to pull them out next year and have them on display. And as a side note, I just looked up the ornaments to link them here and whoa! They sell for a lot of money now. Not sure why, but I certainly didn’t pay that much for mine way back when. In fact, I have the price tag on one box and I think I got it on clearance for $6!

It was nice taking the afternoon to pull out all my things and go through them, think about the memories associated with each item. I did end up putting some things in the donate pile, but mostly I ended up rearranging things and adding things to various shelves. I know things don’t make us happy, but boy it sure put a smile on my face to see my stuff sitting in a new home.

So I’ll quickly tell you about each of the items above. First, the clothespin doll was made by a friend. I sent her the picture and she said she had totally forgotten about those dolls. I have an addiction to all things beachy/cape cod/preppy. So I put my beach towels in the crab basket. I love that calendar from The Little Canoe. It doesn’t have the year on it and I don’t remember what year it’s from and she doesn’t make them anymore, but I hung it up anyway. I love looking at the illustrations. Pictures 4,5, and 8 are just updates to my decorations. The scrabble tiles are all vintage. Once upon a time I was addicted to collecting them. At our last homestead I had the name of the homestead (The Hankins Homestead and Chicken Refuge) spelled out in the tiles. And the rocking chair-it was my Mom’s Mom’s chair. The quilt is handmade from my Dad’s family. And I had forgotten about the little fox couple I bought on sale at Cracker Barrel years ago.

The Good Things List 2/15/2021

This week wouldn’t start off right without a “Good Things List”!

  1. Coffee with friends around the kitchen table. Boy how I’ve missed that. We stopped over at our friend’s house and had a nice long chat over coffee. It was nice.
  2. Making! I took the time on Saturday to make the wreath you see in the first group of pics above.
  3. Buying myself a very nice gift. That’s all I’m going to say until it arrives.
  4. Setting up the seed starting station. We’re getting closer and closer to that time of the year.
  5. Pulling out the maple syrup stuff. It’s almost time y’all!
  6. Adding a day each week for ‘making’. I have a list (of course!) and it looks something like this: soap, pasta, mustard, mozzarella, rendering lard, processing.

PS. thanks to my friend Leslie for always having such great information in her posts. I’m linking up for #lifethisweek. The theme is self care. Self care comes in many forms and for me it was taking the time to redecorate and think about all my lovely items and how they make me smile.

I hope you all are doing well. Let me know what you’ve been up to! I’ll be back soon with some good updates (chickens, that intro post I keep talking about).

’til next time
-k
xoxo