I’m just learning to use a site called Storify.com… if you see this on the homepage of my site, click through to read it… Read the rest >>>

We’re supposed to get snow in a couple of days, so we went walking nearby today, warm and sunny. Click on the image to see my photocollage larger… I’m so grateful to live in an incredibly beautiful place! Simple living to me always means focusing on the world around us!

A couple of years ago or so, I muttered to myself, “I gotta lose weight!” So in typical writerly style, I registered that as a website domain name: gottaloseweight.com.

But I didn’t do a thing about it. Now, finally, I am losing weight and I am also working on the site. Writing is how I learn things.

This ties in with simple living and green living–and that is part of what motivated me to finally get going on a weight loss project. Read the rest >>>

The Small-Scale Poultry Flock: An All-Natural Approach to Raising Chickens and Other Fowl for Home and Market Growers–With information on building soil fertility, replacing purchased feed, and working with poultry in the garden by Harvey Ussery, is the most comprehensive book I’ve ever read on chickens. You might guess that from the title! I’ve had chickens twice and we are planning to get them again next year, so I’ve been reading up on chickens. This book, by long-time flockster (that’s a word he invented) and homesteader Ussery, is full of all kinds of ideas and information for other flocksters and wannabes. You could read it  and know plenty to get started with chickens or to take your chicken raising to new levels. At over 400 pages, with countless color illustrations, the book is a treasure.

The Small Scale Poultry Flock is divided into seven sections. In Part One, Getting Started, the first chapter is called “Why Bother?” and it proceeds to give a full answer, Read the rest >>>

We finally had our first real frost. At 8,000 feet here in Colorado, our average date of the first frost is about 12 days ago. Every extra day has been precious, but this morning the outdoor thermometer said 28 and the leaves of many plants were drooping. I had done a good bit of harvesting this week and I did more today.

But where to put it all? Our winter squashes went on the bookcase in the hall, on a high shelf just out of reach of the dogs. It isn’t as cool as I’d like there, but we’ll just have to eat them sooner this year. Maybe by next year we will have some sort of root cellar, maybe even combined with the possible chicken house we talk about. Read the rest >>>

My sewing machine wouldn’t work. Well, it would after a fashion. I could sew a straight stitch backwards. That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I bought my Viking 6460… what, over 30 years ago? REALLY? You mean it’s an antique? What does that make ME?

All those colors you see across the top represent different stitches. I have my favorites, and a while back I wanted to do some mending with some of those stitches. That’s when I discovered that I couldn’t. Not to worry, the same thing had happened years earlier and a fabric store had fixed it by giving the machine a good oiling.

So we took the machine, all 40 pounds of it, back to that store, which had changed hands in the meantime. Weeks later, I got a phone call that they couldn’t fix the machine. They couldn’t even figure out Read the rest >>>