Random Chatter: 9/3/14

Here’s what I’ve been doing over the past couple of months that I haven’t been doing Random Chatter:

I’ve been listening to the classics: I’ve now finished Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Gray, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and The Elusive Pimpernel.

I didn’t grow up reading the classics, and to be honest, I don’t think I could read them still.  However, I love listening to them!  My favorite has definitely been The Scarlet Pimpernel (I actually just started listening to it again yesterday).

I listen (on 1.25x speed) while I’m working on house projects, mostly.

Speaking of house projects, this summer has been filled with painting.  Lots of it.

And only 25% of it has gotten in my hair!

I have questioned many times why we are painting the house ourselves.  We have been working on it for months – literally – I think we started in late winter, painting a section at a time and we are just now almost finished with the gray and have barely started on the white.  (However, the white is just going on white so you can’t really tell it hasn’t been painted until you are up close.)

Anyway, so part of the reason it has taken forever and another part of why we are doing it ourselves is that there are so many things to patch, scrape, and otherwise take off (old lighting rods, telephone cables, staples, etc.).  When it comes time to repaint, I will petition to hire it out, although once the color change is done and all the junk is off the house it won’t be nearly as time-consuming to paint so you’ll probably see us on ladder again in five years.

I’ve also been canning and was slightly addicted to it for a few weeks.  I canned strawberry jam, peach jam, salsa verde, peach butter, applesauce, cranberry-pear sauce, cranberry relish, and peach pie filling.

My results were mostly a success!  I didn’t leave enough head room in the peach pie filling, so it spilled out the top and I opted to just refrigerate it even though it seemed to seal.  No one really likes the peach butter, and the cranberry relish has a not-great texture (not sure what happened there, because I’ve canned it before and it’s been fine).  But overall, it was super fun.

Also, I must admit that I’m storing most of my goods on my open shelves which is the opposite of a dark place, but seriously, 50% of the reason canning is fun to me is because it looks pretty in the jar, so I’m keeping it out in the open for now.

No picture for this, but baby toads have been getting into our house. We’ve now caught five, and I’m getting quite nervous for what these means about mice coming in during the winter.  (I know we could call an exterminator, but since we have only renovated 1/3 of the house, there are still so many places for them to come in that it would be pointless right now.)

We started school August 1st.  I think it was crazy early even though some of the districts started August 1st, too.  My goal in starting early is getting out early – since April and May is when we are busy listing a lot of houses, I’d like to be mostly done with school during that time of year.

At the beginning of this year, I cut back on blogging and started doing more real estate stuff for Jeremy. I’m still loving it, but am busier with that than I was with blogging!  This has been a great year for our real estate business (the house pictured about is coming on the market this Thursday!), and I’m still trying to figure out how to balance real estate work, blogging, and homeschooling.  I felt like I had a pretty good handle on work until we started school, and now I’m trying to get into a groove that has less free time than I’ve previously been used to.

Oh yes, I mentioned before that I was having issues with thyroid and iron, so here’s the update: we got my iron levels up into the normal range, and are working on figuring out the best way to keep it in a good range.  My thyroid levels went down like they were supposed to after starting medicine, but not as much as we wanted them to (thank goodness, because I felt only somewhat better!), so we upped the dosage and I’m feeling much more like myself.  I hate taking drugs and really hate the idea of having to take thyroid meds the rest of my life (likely) but man, I am really thankful that God gave people the capacity to be able to diagnose and treat health problems!

Fall is in the air.  I love how you can feel and hear the seasons change!