Dinner with my 18 month old daughter

Eat leftover pulled pork. Mmm, nommy, nommy, nommy.

Eat leftover baked potato. Mmm, nom, nom, nom.

Nibble on roll from pulled pork sandwich that kind of tastes like pork. Yum, yum, yum.

Sip milk now and then.

Put down bit of potato and hit a pea just right so it flies off your plate and onto the floor. Go oooooooh. Start slamming hand into peas and flinging them all over.

Mommy declares dinner over. Mommy is a no-fun poopyhead.

Progress was made...

As my father's day gift to my husband, I stayed home today while he took the baby out to his folks house and tried to get the back room arranged for his new computer that will be here in a couple weeks. I made good progress, but there's still plenty to do.

I'm going to feel so good when it's clean back there, the kind of clean that it will stay because I found homes for everything that was cluttering the place up.

Yay!

Here We Are Again

My plants are mostly all in! They're all in pots. I'd like to plant a little in the actual tiny bit of ground I have, but I'd have to break it up by shovel and I'm not sure I want to do it that badly.

So, my husband ordered a new computer this week. He's never had one that would actually run the newest games, and he decided it was time. Since he's so careful with money and great at saving, I can't give him a hard time about making a big purchase. And it will be nice to have a second computer in the house again. I just hope he doesn't spend all his time computer gaming after it gets here.

Anyone ever noticed how hard it is to change habits, even when you truly believe it should be done? It's hard. These habits developed for a reason, and the reasons are still there. It's very had to replace several poor coping methods with better ones. But I've become more and more aware, and at least this time I can't shake the thoughts about it. I guess that's a step in the right direction.

Life is Busy

Well, it is when you take your daughter to Wisconsin on your own.

We've been home about a week now, and things are still busy and a little stressful. Without giving too many details the state of our state's economy is threatening both my and my husband's jobs (at least not on a permanent basis) and the waiting is killing me.

So I've been trying to focus on good things. Like how much help strangers gave me in the airports after they saw me pushing a stroller with one hand and hauling our carry-on and her car seat around. One woman even installed the car seat on the plane for me! Thank you again, First-class passenger in green.

My father-in-law took the baby today while my husband went with my mother-in-law out of town on some family business. I busied myself with cleaning up in my living room. It's a little disheartening to see how it doesn't look all that cleaned up. But it's just small and crowded and never going to look nice and neat.

Ah well, it is what it is.

I did get my plants in this weekend, so I'm very happy about that. And I learned that I can get a community garden plot at my work for next year! We'll see if I do well keeping up with them this year. If I do, maybe I'll take the plunge.

Small steps to big changes.

I promised myself when I started this blog that it would just be for some of the wierd, random observations I have about my life and life in general. But I think I need a place to chronicle the changes I want to make in my life. So following is a big, long post about some thoughts I've been having lately. Feel free to skip it. I'm sure I'll have some silly rant or weird observation to put on top in the next few days. :)

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been reading a book called “Radical Homemakers”. It’s been a fascinating read and it’s rattling around in my brain. Of course, I picked the book because I felt it would be interesting, but I didn’t realize how many buttons it would hit for me.

I’m seriously considering asking my husband to read it.

All my life, I have known that a regular 9 to 5 kind of gig or a high-powered career was not for me. It’s just not. I don’t want it. I’m not afraid of work, but I want the work I do to be in support of my life, not someone else’s interest. I want my work to be of value to me, rather than being valued by someone else by the dollar. I don’t hate my job, but I do hate losing the time, which I value much more highly than the money.

So this book starts by talking about the changes in society of the last 200 or so years that have made us into a 2-income household nation, and made us think we need all this money. The author calls it an extractive economy. The second half is drawn from her interviews with 20 households (couples, singles, families) who have decided to live their lives for themselves. These are not people who are not working, they are just not working for someone else. They are working to support themselves in such a way that money is NOT the thing they need most. And I love this idea.

I don’t want to be as independent as some of these people have become, but I do want to invest more of my time in myself, my husband, my daughter, my marriage and my home.

There are some steps I need to take before I can move into this kind of lifestyle. Of course, according to many of the people interviewed for the book, the first step you take is a step into the lifestyle.

First, I need more energy. I never have any, and it’s because I take very bad care of myself. My weight is out of control and I have no endurance. Convincing myself I need to lose weight has never helped me. I’ve known that for a long time and done nothing. But the pursuit of energy, with no worry about whether I lose weight or not, that I can do. Exercise for energy, not weight loss, that I can do.

One step at a time, I’d like to get myself into a position where I can work only part-time. I may look into doing something like medical transcription, which I could do from home. Ideally, I wouldn’t work at all, but I’m not certain I’m willing to go to full growing food and raising animals mode. I have to figure out how I could contribute to the home so we need less money while I work on the energy getting. I want to learn to properly garden, and learn to can and store my food. I want to learn to live with less plastic (although I don’t think I’ll convince anybody not to give our daughter plastic toys, and I’m not sure I want to; but at least those can be donated and used again).

I think I may be completely insane at this point, but if a major lifestyle change is what’s needed to take better care of myself, my husband, and my little girl, then that’s what it’ll have to be. I want to be here a long time, and not regret lost time when it’s time to go.

Getting ready to garden

Tomorrow my husband is going to take the little one to Grandma and Grandpa's. I think I'm going to stay here and clean out my gardening pots.

I was a bad girl last fall and didn't clean out the plants, and this spring now I've got a great garden of weeds growing in them. So before I can buy new plants for this year and get them in the ground, I need to clean out the pots.

I'm SO not looking forward to that.

Way too much crap

I'm pretending we're moving.

Our lease is coming up soon, and although we intend to sign for another year, I'm pretending we're moving. I am packing away anything we don't need in labeled boxes to go in the basement, and hopefully tossing or donating anything we just don't need at all.

This will probably take about a year, and then we actually will move. (Note: Biki-cat, please come home before we move away, otherwise how will you find us?)

Last night I started packing away RPG books, and holy crap do we have a lot... And there are plenty staying out too. Yikes.

This may be a bigger job than I thought.