Ever wake up one day and realize how weird your life has become?

You make plans. The plans don’t work out.

You criticize and blame yourself for not meeting your goals. You become embarrassed to tell people that things didn’t work out as planned and then you say to yourself, “Oh shoot! Why did I even tell anybody about what I am trying to do?”

Yep. I confess. I’m like that. This is why I never make New Year’s resolutions. This is why I never set goals for losing weight. This is why I don’t set dates for accomplishing goals.

It’s pointless for me to make long-term plans, because, oh gosh… my life has such ups and downs that sometimes, I feel like I can hardly breathe.

Have you ever felt that way? Or is it just me?

It’s been six weeks since I’ve updated you about this project. It’s been a little longer than that since I’ve given you a recipe or a new idea. I haven’t forgotten about you. I just had to make some choices.

Here’s why…

1. I have Fibromyalgia. This means that occasionally, I have what is known as a Fibro Flare. When it happens, I feel unusually tired and achy – the kind of achy that you get when you first get the flu.

Not fun.

I’ve had Fibromyalgia since 1988. I have a good doctor and am getting great treatment, but even with that, sometimes life comes at me too quickly. I forget to pace myself because I feel good, and then I get sick because I haven’t been taking care of myself.

Yep, that’s what happened.

Also, I have recently learned that I have Sleep Apnea and so I haven’t been getting the kind of restorative sleep that Fibro patients need. My family tells me that my snoring is so loud that they can hear it clear across the house.

Embarrassing.

If I don’t get enough sleep, my Fibro goes nuts. The good news is that I’ve been diagnosed with Sleep Apnea now, have had my second sleep test in which they figured out what kind of machine I’ll need to help me breathe better at night, and soon I’ll have said machine. I want to sleep well, so I’ll go along with it, even though wearing the mask at night make me look like a space alien.

2. We moved Mom into our basement apartment. The ceilings in the basement are 9 feet high and there are large windows down there, so she doesn’t feel like she is in a basement. She likes it enough that she’s been wishing that my father was still alive so that he could enjoy it, too.

Here’s what her living room looks like. The other side of the apartment is even brighter because it has south-facing windows. She has two bedrooms and a huge bathroom.

3. We’re putting in a little kitchen and laundry room for Mom. We’re in the final stretch with that project. We are ready for the cabinets now and they’ll be installed next Wednesday. We’re hopeful that Mom can move into it before Christmas.

The tile floors went in this week. It’s brighter in here than the photo shows. The room doesn’t have a window, so Gary has set it up so it will have lots of light. He’s putting lights under the top cabinets and under the toe kicks. I wish you could see the tile better, because it’s really pretty.

Fun Stuff

We put up our Christmas decorations. Gary moved the family room furniture around recently and suddenly, we had room to put up our big Christmas tree. When we moved to this house, we had the family room set up all wrong. Thinking that our tree would never fit in there, we bought a new narrower, tall tree. Now have two trees and for the first time, they are both up!

We bought this Christmas tree 27 years ago. It’s still as beautiful as ever. You can’t buy trees like this anymore. It’s so full.  I’ve collected some cute Santa Claus, snowmen and penguin ornaments over the years. They make me smile every time I hang them on the tree.

This is our newer tree. It’s the kind that already has the lights on it, so it’s easy to decorate. This tree has our “pretty” ornaments on it.

I love all the mixed colors and the birds I collected. Everything came from Target so it’s funky and fun.

One of my favorite things about this house is our entry way. As soon as we saw it, we all said, “Won’t it be fun to put garland on the railing at Christmas time?”

Because we don’t have a fireplace, I hang our stockings on the railings. I haven’t gotten around to that yet.

The little book shelf you see has our collection of Santa Clauses on it.

I didn’t take a photo of them, but I have lots of Nativity sets in our living room.

I love snow globes! Three years ago, I started collecting them. I haven’t bought this year’s installment yet, but I’m looking forward to shopping for it.

Gary collects CDs of Christmas music. Every year, he hauls them out and blasts the music out because he’s kind of deaf in one ear. (Yikes!)

We also have a substantial collection of Christmas movies. We always watch our favorites AND we spend lots of time watching cable Christmas movies. We’re hopeless.

Gary has to work on Christmas Eve this year, so we’re having our Christmas dinner on the 23rd.

I have ONE more thing to tell you and I’m so excited about it!

As I helped my Mom pack to move up here, I came across my grandmother’s cookbook. I vaguely – vaguely – remember seeing it as a child, but had completely forgotten that it existed. It’s so fragile that Mom kept it in a zipped bag.

I went crazy with excitement when I saw it. I carefully turned the pages and saw that Grandma had written or glued the recipes she collected over her lifetime right on top of the cookbook pages, because she was so poor during the Depression that she couldn’t afford to do it any other way. Mom said that Grandma got this cookbook in a class that she took in high school. She was only able to attend one year, because things were different then.

As I looked at through it, Mom told me that she was going to keep the recipe book for the rest of her life.

I said, “Well, at least you’ll be living in my house, so I can copy some of the recipes down.”

Imagine my surprise when Mom gave it to me on my birthday! Yay!

The front of the book

Inside

Grandma glued and inserted recipes she found. Most of the people she got recipes are gone now. That’s how old these recipes are.

This recipe for Hot Water Cake was my Great-grandma Johnson’s recipe. (Grandma’s mother)

My Plans for the Cookbook

Naturally, I’m going to share some of these recipes with you once things calm down a bit, because I’m excited to try them out.

I’ve also decided that I better type them into the computer so that we won’t lose them. I want to share them with the rest of my family.

And since, I’m doing that, I’ve decided that I will release them as collections, organized by recipe type, as Kindle books so that you can have your own copy, too!

I don’t know how long it will take me to get the Kindle books ready, but I’ll keep you updated. I’ll make sure to price them reasonably so that you can enjoy them.

My Progress on My Homemaking Goals

As you can imagine, I haven’t kept up with my goal of doing one homemaking thing every day. I was too sick for too long. However, I have managed to keep my kitchen clean and have developed some great habits to keep it easy for me to do. That doesn’t sound like much, but I had become such a slacker, I had to repent. Having Mom here helps me, because she pitches in when I’m having a bad day.

I’ve also started relieving Gary of some of the laundry duty, which he’s been grateful for.

I made most of our Thanksgiving dinner.

Hmmmm…. I guess that’s all I can remember right now.

Life Lesson

Let’s all just do the best we can and try not to get upset with ourselves when things don’t go our way. It doesn’t matter that we fall down. It matters if we get up!

So…tell me… how are you doing? Anything new or exciting? I’ve missed you guys!

 

October has passed in a sleepy, foggy blur. It started out with a virus that turned into a major Fibromyalgia flare, which has left me exhausted most of the time. (I’ve had Fibromyalgia since 1988. If you’d like to read more about my struggle with it, you can go to my RoPaxman.com blog and search the term Fibromyalgia.)

Sadly, this has meant that I haven’t been able to a homemaking project everyday this month, but I have managed to get quite a bit accomplished. It’s been slow going since I’ve only been able to work a few hours a day. I typically get up, do a little work, and then I have to lie down again and rest. This meant that I’ve had to choose carefully what I do. I haven’t felt up to blogging before today, so you can today’s post as a sign that I’m feeling a little better.

I mentioned in my last post that Mom is coming to live with us. We turned our basement into a pseudo-apartment when my daughter and her family moved in with us a couple of years ago – which was a beginning – but since Mom will be living with us for years (hopefully she’ll live a long time), we decided to complete the apartment so that Mom can be independent.

We have two large storage rooms in the basement which we have used for our food storage. One of them is a cold storage room (thick cement walls with no windows) and that’s where we store our canned food. The other one has held our buckets of wheat, oats, rice, and such, along with our soaps, paper goods, and canning supplies. We’ll turn this room into a kitchen for Mom because it was already plumbed for one. We’ll divide the furnace room next door to create a small laundry room.

There is just enough space in this room to build a small L-shaped kitchen containing all the major appliances, a couple of base cabinets and a small bank of drawers. I think we’ll put a nice tile design over the sink because we can’t put in a window. We are going to put in a lot of lights to brighten it up.

John Jorgensen will do the work for us. He has done other jobs for us over the years and because he built the home originally, I never have to tell him what supplies to get. He just goes out and matches what we have!

If you live in our area and need some remodeling, I highly recommend John. He does great work at very fair prices and is super nice to boot! If you are thinking of building a home, John’s your man!

This is the room that we’ll divide to create a laundry room for Mom. The front half will have just enough space to hold a traditional washer and dryer set. The plumber is going to move the water softener next to the back wall and he’ll move the salt tank into the garage above. Gary is happy that he won’t have to haul big bags of salt to the basement anymore. The water storage tank (containing drinkable water) will also go out in the garage.

The big job was emptying out the big storage room. We’ve had to shuffle everything and organize a lot of closets ato accommodate its belongings.

We have so many buckets of wheat and other dry food that Gary decided to hire the neighbor boys to help carry it up to the garage.  It took the four men (Gary, Andrew, and the two neighbors) a couple of hours to get it done.

We have a three-car garage with a double bay on the west  side and a single bay on the east. The food is going to take up the single bay. I’m grateful that we have the room because I don’t know what we’d do otherwise.

We still have to put all of this away. Some of it will go out on the shelves in the garage and some of it is going in closets throughout the house. This means that I had to clean closets to make room.

This house has tons and tons of storage. John originally built it for his family with the intention that they would live here for the rest of their lives, but the housing crisis changed their plans. In 2008, he owned this home and a spec home and he needed to sell one of them. As soon as we walked in the front door of this house, we felt that this was where we should be.

I didn’t understand at the time why we needed such a big home because our kids were all getting older and it seemed silly to get it, but now everything makes sense. I never imagined that we would need a basement apartment so badly. We just couldn’t have made it in our old home. There wasn’t enough room to fit all of these people that have lived with us!

It was inspiration, I’ll tell you…inspiration. The whole thing was so strange since we hadn’t had a yen to move. We’d just spent eleven years remodeling our West Jordan home and had finally finished it a few months before. But then, three of us had dreams that we moved so we decided to look around and see what we’d find. Before we knew what had happened to us, we had moved over here and had sold our home. We sold it in less than two weeks for the list price! I guess it was just meant to be, because homes weren’t selling well at all.

Anyway… because John built this home for his family, he put storage closets in ever spot imaginable. The upstairs hallway has three large closets and the laundry room has another one. He also put big storage closets under the eves.

When I started this organization project, every single closet was full, but – as it turned out – they were full of junk. We didn’t have time to sort through things when we moved here so we just shoved our belongings anywhere they would fit. Since I needed to create space, I decided that I better go through everything we own and get rid of what we no longer use.

Two of the hall closets held linens. Once I had finished, I created this much extra room. I washed and aired out all the blankets and quilts as I went.

This is the other linen closet. I love seeing all the blankets lined up so neatly. I know… I know… everything is not match-y, match-y, (I am not Martha Stewart) but hey… that’s okay with me. This is my real life – not a “I’m a cool blogger” life.

Here’s an organization trick I learned while collecting images on Pinterest: Store sheet sets in one of the matching pillow cases to keep everything together. My bundles aren’t perfectly lined up and super tidy, because my sheets aren’t folded perfectly. I don’t fuss about things like that. Good enough is good enough, I always say. I’m just happy to know that when I want to change my sheets, all I have to do is grab a bundle and I’ll know that everything I need is in it.

Why didn’t I think of that before? It’s such a great idea.

This is my favorite closet. Gary didn’t think it was possible to put all of our soap storage in the laundry room closet, but I had a feeling that the mess in it was hiding a lot of room.

Wah-lah! It fit!

Just in case you are wondering why we store so much stuff…

I belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) and our leaders have taught us for years – longer than I’ve been alive – to store food and other necessities. When I was a child, they advised people to store 2 year’s worth, but later, the recommended amount became 1 years worth.

Building a store of food and supplies doesn’t happen overnight. It took us six years to put what we have together. We started by buying extra products when things we like to use went on sale. Periodically, we’d buy buckets of grains and other long-term storage items. After two of our children got married (Julianne and Stephen), we decided that we’d better bump it up more – in case something happened to the kids.

Gary is our food storage man. He has enjoyed the project of getting us prepared for the future and often says that if there is a big disaster, we can help others.

Over the years, we’ve experienced a few periods of unemployment, but because of our practice of storing food, we were able to get along okay. No matter how tough things got, we knew that we could eat and do our laundry. Living through those times has shown us the wisdom of preparing because you never know what will happen next.

Note: I’m planning on discussing food and necessities storage (getting it, where to put it when you don’t have a lot of room, using it, rotating it) in future posts. It’s a great way to save money and protect yourself from inflation and, as we’ve just seen with the Superstorm Sandy, when emergencies occur, grocery store shelves empty out quickly. If you don’t store anything else, you should store water!

Here are a couple some photos of our basement food supply. (We also have pantry storage in our kitchen.)

When Julianne and Kendyn moved out, Julianne went shopping in our storage which gave them a little start. I always tell her that there’s no reason for them to ever go hungry. That thought has comforted me as I’ve adjusted to not having them around. (I’m a mom. Moms worry, even about their adult children. I think it’s in our DNA.)

Speaking of which… I can’t have an update post without a picture of my cuties! Julianne and Miss Baylee came to visit this morning.

Miss Baylee always expects Grandpa to give her some candy when she visits and he didn’t disappoint her today. He let her pick out a couple of pieces of Halloween candy from the big bowl.

I also cleaned out one of the closets under the eves.

I didn’t think to take any before photos of the closets I cleaned and it’s hard to describe what a mess they all were. The white shelves came from the storage room in the basement that will soon be a kitchen. The big filing cabinet at the end of the room holds my music (I was a music teacher for decades). Before I filed it away last week, all the music was in boxes which made it nearly impossible to find anything.

I kept all the music I use to teach piano lessons, but I decided to give away most of my choral and violin music. It was quite traumatic to give away the string music, but since I sold my 1770 German violin to raise money to start Scrap Girls (my former company), I just haven’t had the heart to think about getting another violin. I did keep some of my favorite pieces – just in case a miracle occurs and a violin drops into my life. I couldn’t bear to part with them because they were all marked up by my violin teachers.

Such wonderful memories on those sheets of paper.

This is the other end of that big storage room. You can’t see them well, but I have a lot of plastic storage bins by the window that hold my craft supplies and the kids’ elementary school papers.

I keep all of our tax records in accordion folders – one per year. I’ve filing them away like this and it makes tax preparation super easy. If I need a receipt for any reason, it’s a snap to find what I want.

These boxes contain tons of framed family photos. Someday, I’ll hang them on the stairwell and on the 2nd floor landing. I’ve collected ideas on Pinterest for over a year now.

These are my favorite ideas. I think it’s interesting how the top one has images inside of “empty” frames. I have so many older family photos that are odd sizes and I don’t want to pay to have them framed. The frames were to match.

The second and third samples don’t have matching frames. I like the idea of putting fun items – such as that bird house – inside of interesting frames. The frames don’t match in the third sample either. I also like the idea of mixing vintage prints with my family photos.

Once I get all of this organizing done and Mom is moved in, I’m going to tackle this project. I’m excited to start. It will feel like a reward for all the hard work I’ve done.

Continuing on…

Because of my work with Scrap Girls (the digital scrapbooking company I used to own), I had collected massive numbers of scrapbooking magazines. I decided to go through them and cut out the ideas I enjoyed the most. It took two days to get through them all and once it was over, this was all that was left.

Here’s the last closet in the upstairs hall. The bottom shelves hold our games, which are going to go downstairs once I clean up….

…this mess. This is the closet next to the family room.

I also need to clean….

…the closet in my office. What a disaster. I’ll probably move the books up to those white shelves in the storage room under the eves because I don’t use them much. (It doesn’t help that I can’t get to them.) I’ll move all of my scrapbooking supplies, family photos, etc. into this closet so that I can organize and scrapbook them.

And now… a food photo! Yay!

One Sunday, I made some cinnamon-apple-raisin rolls using Mom’s sweet roll recipe. They were awesome. Since I haven’t made them for so many years, that I decided I better practice before I show you how to make the dough because it happens in an unusual way. You can look forward to that recipe coming along in the future.

Yummy!

The china plate comes from Mom’s wedding china set. We’ve had discussions about whether I should give it back to her when she moves here. (She’s using my grandmother’s china now.) This set is incomplete, but I really love it because it has pink peonies on it. I told her that it doesn’t matter who has it because it will be in the same house and if she wants to use it, she can!

Funny.

Well, better run now… I have closets calling my name.

Talk to you later.

—

P.S. I hope that you’ll excuse any errors I’ve made today. I’m feeling pooped and my editing brain cells feel broken.

P.P.S. Sorry that this post is so long. Three weeks was a long time!

No photos today. I’ve been sick most of the week. I guess I could take a photo of my hair sticking straight up (it’s doing that now), or a picture of my red, drippy eyee, or my packed sinuses, or the pink fuzzy nightgown that has been comforting, me for days.

Naw… Better not.

Last Thursday, I made a big batch of yummy spaghetti sauce that I stuffed full of garden vegetables and fresh herbs. I was able to freeze two quarts to use in the future.

We went down to see my mom for the weekend and while we were there, it was pretty much decided that she will be moving into our basement apartment. We’ll turn a storage room into a small kitchen and install a washer and dryer for her so that she’ll feel independent. Our basement has huge windows and it’s light and airy, so it should be comfortable for her. But oh my… There’s a lot to do.

I’ll think about it once my head stops spinning. (Feeling kind of dizzy at the moment.)

Talk to you later.