Weekend reading

Have you had a good week? I've had a lovely week with visitors, multiple family tree discoveries and my housework, and tomorrow we're having a family lunch here with all the grandkids and assorted parents. 

I feel the absolute bitterness of summer coming to a close with shorter days, but it's still hot and humid. There's more rain forecast for the weekend so I hope that spreads itself out and we all share the rain and its benefits.

Here is one of our visitors - Nicole from This Simple Day. We've known each other online for a couple of years but this was our first face-to-face meeting. I had a thoroughly enjoyable morning. Nicole brought finger limes and Brazilian spinach with her and went home with a bunch of Welsh onions. Such a simple exchange of time and produce but deeply satisfying on many levels and symbolic of the way we both live.

Discovering my family and preserving their goodness

It's been a good week here at home.  I've been researching my family tree again - an ongoing, intermittent project since 1980. Learning about my long-ago family is so interesting and engrossing.  Their lives would have been much harder than ours so I would like them to know that we survived and their hard work paid off. Collectively, they laid a firm foundation for our family and that I'm very thankful for their resilience, strength and intelligence.

Genealogy is such a rewarding pastime. I started my research in 1980 when getting just one piece of information took many letters and a lot of time.  Now we're connected to archives all over the world. All you need to start is a name and a birth, death or marriage date and you'll soon see connections happen as your past comes alive.

Weekend reading

I'm very pleased to tell you that it's been raining here for the past nine days. On the last rainy day, the rain gauge overflowed.  A total of 265 mm/10.5 inches all up. It's changed the feel of the backyard and what was brown is now green and growing fast.  The rain here resulted in a few flooded areas but up and down the coast, with the effects of Cyclone Uesi battering the east coast, it not only brought rain to areas that had been dry for many years, it also put out all the bushfires. That is good news for us all.

Full to the brim and overflowing. A sight for sore eyes. 

Keep calm and carry on

Not many of us really enjoy housework. I love being in my home but if I look at housework as one big thing - washing, cleaning, cooking, baking, gardening, maintenance, mending etc. - it can be overwhelming and I don't know where to start. My best advice is to organise yourself and do things ahead of time. Most of us don't do all our housework in one day. We organise smaller chunks of work and spread it out over a week, or a weekend with small chores morning and evening. When you organise your work into chunks and do it at the same time each week or day, that's a routine and it usually makes it easier.

Here is our tea and coffee station.  It's right next to the electric kettle, with cups and mugs in a cupboard above. If you have hot drinks fairly frequently, it sensible to keep all your things together.

Weekend reading

In the past few months I've been asked by quite a few readers to restart my Weekend Reading. This list is made up of things I've Googled in the past week as well as some of my general online reading that I think others might be interested in.  Let's see how it goes this time.  I hope you enjoy it.

I didn't grow these roses, they were a gift.  🙂

Linen bread bag

I finished my bread bag a couple of days ago and it's a nice bag to use. I'm not sure how good it would be in other climates but with our humidity, it doesn't trap moisture inside the bag and it doesn't go mouldy. If you're in a cold or mild climate, and you have been using a linen bag, please tell us what your experience is.

Micro-plastics, plastics, plastic pollution

This is the followup to an Instagram post about getting rid of my microfibre cleaning cloths. I watched a program on plastic waste hosted by Hugh Fernly-Whittingstall and Anita Rani, produced by BBC1, and it showed the terrible cost of keeping those cloths. It's on Foxtel's Lifestyle Channel in Australia (episode 3 tomorrow at 7.30pm) and on the BBC iPlayer in the UK. If you don't have access to those sites, the first episode is here: DailyMotion.  I hope you watch it if you can but it is the second episode that was mind-blowing for me.  I can't find that one or episode 3 online.

It looks clean but there are plastics in all our oceans and the problem is getting worse.

Make your own household linens

Making your own household linens is a BIG step towards a simpler life. You'll use numerous simple living skills such as sewing, recycling, budgeting, home maintenance and organisation when you actively work towards fabric recycling and creating your own cloths, bags, napery and soft furnishings. I gave up looking for what I wanted in the shops many years ago and over the years I've made cheese and yoghurt straining cloths, tablecloths, tea towels, hair towels, tea cosies, table runners, aprons, napkins, shopping bags, pillowcases, cushion covers, lamp skirts, bread bags, mats, plate covers, cool cotton sheets and warm woollen blankets for Gracie's bed. Increasingly what I want is not sold in any shop and I get a wonderful sense of reassurance and satisfaction when I make what I need. About 90 percent of the time I use recycled materials. 

This is a simple activity that takes only time, a change of mindset and a bit of effort but it will make a huge difference to your day-to-day life. And if you do this and can stand back from the commercial world, where everything has a monetary value instead of an environmental one, you, my friend, will put yourself in a powerful and sustainable position.

I'm about halfway through this project - a new linen bread bag using linen I first wore as a skirt many years ago.