Kate Singh's Blog, page 2

Books, Books, Books and Where To Find The Time

I have ordered so many good books recently. And, of course, they all came in at the same time. Hopefully, I can renew a few times. I’m not the fastest reader and I have housecleaning and a family to tend to. I have a book to edit and my exercise routine. I’m getting the kids out more now that the sun is shining for a few days.

I have visions of leisurely laying in the hammock with stacks of novels near me on the porch floor, a tall glass of iced tea with a mint leaf from the garden. But this is still two and a half months away.

At present I have English and Math assignments to work on with the youngest and my many jobs. I will practice speed reading. A friend of mine talked about skimming books and reading a novel every other day. I was impressed. She works full time and still flies through the books. So, I started doing a little speed reading myself and I found that many books are 20% story and 80% filler. You can skim through them and not miss much. Then there are the books that you want to chew every bite slowly and taste the layers of flavor.

There are books that are so colorful and eloquent that they teach me to think deeper and write with more flare. I don’t rush those. I have taken to annotating the books I own. I highlight and tab up a storm and it helps me study them and digest the brilliant metaphors and turn over fresh ideas.

Books have taught me to write better, think deeper and have inspired me to change big things in my lifestyle.

Essentialism by Greg McKeown helped me downsize my jobs and make my life easier. I learned to pick two priorities and let everything else go so I could thrive focusing on two parts instead of doing so many things just ok.

What Falls From The Sky by Esther Emery encouraged me to unplug the internet for a couple years so my family could get back to real life; reading, thinking for themselves, artwork, and being outside. We didn’t do it 100% but it was enough for us to see how it effects us and that we don’t want it turned on full time. Sadly, it is back on again for school but there are intense boundaries.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond gave me more compassion and understanding of the human condition with poverty and slum lords. It also enforced my determination to secure our housing. When we made a big profit off selling our rental, instead of blowing it on an RV or inground pool as we dreamed of doing, we paid off half of this mortgage. That was because I read this book before we had the check in hand and thus, we made a smart decision for us. We don’t need an RV for travel as we don’t really have time to travel and we bought an above ground pool for $350 at Habitat For Humanity. It has made every Summer wonderful.

Samuel Pepys is a biography of a Naval administrator for the Royal Navy from the seventeenth century who journaled his life every day for ten years. He wrote about the Plague and the Great Fire of London and years of political and religious upheaval. I have learned so much from him in the way of a history, work ethic, enjoying luxuries of life, what not to do and how not to act as well as how to become an expert in a chosen field and thrive at what ever we choose for a career. He had his faults but he was brilliant and successful. He seems like a strange mentor for me, but I immersed myself in Claire Tomalin’s research and found myself inspired to study and work on my writing with a more scholastic approach as he would have done.

Another author that is inspiring me is Natalie Goldberg. I’m reading Writing Down The Bones, which then had me ordering two other books of hers: Long Quiet Highway and Wild Mind. I love her writing and the way she approaches it. As a fellow writer, I get what she’s talking about and it helps me understand myself as a writer. She sees writing as a Spiritual practice and I love this revelation.

There was a book, Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs that first enlightened me to my eldest having Autism. It was such an unlikely book to get this diagnosis out of, but a small page where Augusten describes his older brother turned the light on for me as a mother and I realized what was going on with my child and went on to do some research, coming to the conclusion that we had high functioning Autism. It changed our life and relationship for the better and was such a blessing.

I could go on but I won’t. I have to get to reading this stack of books.

Reinventing Oneself And Filling The Void

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Recently I decided it was time to reinvent myself. It was time for a full overhaul. I’ve done this many times and it has gotten me far in life. I went from a hard childhood to a full and happy life as a mother and writer. I have healed and grown. I have shifted so many times I can’t keep track. And here I am, very different than from even ten years ago. My close friends will attest to this.

This year the Tibetan Monks visited our town. They come every year and stay a few miles from my house. They have group healings and I attend every single one. Every year. I devour the healings and I am changed, my life is changed every year. My children went with me last year and my eldest was transformed, though he won’t admit it. I saw a vast improvement and a deep honesty with him. He is now a trans female and I believe the courage to be her truest self was found in those healings.

This year there were four intense healings and I showed up ready to go deep. I meditated and visualized like a champ. I sat through each long hour and a half and choked on the incense gratefully. I wanted every drop of that honey. I wore every string blessed by the Dalai Lama and continued the work at home. The changes came fast this time. We are only two and a half months into the year and I’ve rearranged everything from the house furniture to future plans.

When I take the kids to school, I have time to think. Today I went deep. I made honey wheat bread by hand instead of the bread machine, cleaned the house, and rewatched a Chef’s Table France episode all about Allan Passard. Allan Passard inspired me with his story of going from being a 3 Michelin star chef that was famous for his meat dishes but one day found he could no longer stomach working with animal flesh and walked away for a year to find himself anew. He discovered vegetables and came back to reinvent his cooking with only vegetables. He was mocked, lost customers, was told he was going to lose everything, but he found a new life in this sort of cooking and he wasn’t letting it go. He worked night and day to recreate menus and in the end he was successful. He is still a three Michelin star chef and has an amazing fruit and vegetable farm. He cooks almost entirely from his gardens. Today, fifteen years

It takes courage to reinvent yourself, especially when you’re in your fifties.

And there is the risk of failure at first and becoming insecure and returning to the old ways. The old life. We become frightened and doubt ourself so we return to what is safe and familiar. What is already firmly established. That usually turns into a big mistake. We left or chose to change for a reason and that reason doesn’t change.

The key to success at transformation is to empty yourself completey and then quickly fill up with good things, new things. If you empty a space and don’t fill it up, something will fill it for you and it may not be of your choosing.

I have been decluttering and purging for years. This includes stuff and relationships and old ways of living, eating, and thinking. Furniture, people, old journals, diet, negativity, and hustles.

Now I have space and light. It’s wonderful. Then it becomes awkward. I feel bored, I miss certain things and people. I feel nostalgic about things that I got rid of for a solid reason. I want to bring it all back. Why? Because I haven’t refilled the space with new things. I have empty rooms and it feels baren. The rooms need to be filled, decorated, painted, and a cozy fire built to warm it all up. This is figuratively speaking.

I need some space to remain calm and empty where I can have deep thoughts. But the rest must be replaced with new things.

I started thinking about money today. And my marraige. And our savings. Travel.

I was making bread by hand for the first time in what felt like a year. It felt good and the kneading and mixing acts as a therapist and I begin to pour out my thoughts. I thought about my marraige and what I don’t enjoy about it and then worried my bread would be bitter so I focused on happier thoughts and how much I missed working with dough. My bread may turn out bitter sweet. My food taste like my feelings.

I thought about my own poverty consciousness when making the beds. I went all the way back to my childhood to present and realized that I have never lived in abundance. My mother was a single parent that struggled with money and was horrible at budgeting. Then I struggled as a young adult working minimum wage and going to community colleges. At thirty I got myself in debt with in two years. I spent most of my thirties working three jobs to pay off the debt. Next was marrying a man who was an immigrant and made minimum wage and we chose for me to stay home with babies.

My big reads have been things like The Complete Tightwad Gazette and The Cheapskate. I wrote books on frugality. I lived frugality. I filmed frugality. I made money off frugality.

Maybe I’m tired of it. It’s a story that has come to its end. The curtain has dropped and the credits role. The End.

We have a big tax return on the way. Our first decision was to pay a big chunk on the mortgage, but now I’ve decided to take my kids on a trip to Europe. Life is short, kids grow up fast. I only have so much time with them until they fly off to college and have no time for old mummy.

The other day I packed away their computer and grounded them from YouTube and Gaming for at least a year. They are watching junk and learning things that are negative. They are talking about weird stuff or negative topics, celebrity gossip and getting all this misinformation. I had to clear it out. I have to clear it out for myself as well. But now I need to fill that space with something new and positive. Like travel.

For years we have been homebodies, living frugally. Our limited travel was driving to Oregon ever few years for a quick visit with our friend or visiting our friends in the Bay Area. When we travel to friends, I used to pack groceries and kitchen tools and do all the cooking for everyone and then clean the kitchen. I would make beds and keep things tidy out of respect for the hostess. I used to joke that when we go on vacation, I take my work with me. It’s not really a joke. I cook, clean and watch after kids on our vacations. I’m the eternal housewife and mother. Even on vacation.

The last few years we have been home and the biggest travel was to the library. We go out to eat once every few months. Usually lunch because it’s the most affordable. We grow food and planted orchards to have access to organics. I make everything from scratch.

I love my life and I wake up every day looking forward to the little things: my homemade espresso lattes, blogging my thoughts, listening to Opera on Pandora, and being home with the kids.

When I was making the beds, I felt fortunate to have such a charming and cozy home and I’m truly amazed that we did all this with such a little income. That is because I know how to work with very little money. I watched my mother struggle. She was highly educated with a college degree, a law degree and a nursing license. She was mentally unstable and couldn’t deal with the work force or people for extended periods of time. She eventually moved us up to the mountains in an isolated town with a gas station, cafe, corner market and post office. It was the 70s and she grew pot to make a living. This meant that we earned a large chunk of money once a year and had to make it last. She would usually start a home improvement project and spend it all at once, then wring her hands in worry until the next harvest. I have no idea how we got by but we always had a pot of roast or beans and rice on the stove and we always had a roof over our heads.

I had my own learning lessons with money and debt as a young adult. And because of that, I have become very good at working with very little. I know how to stretch a single income, how to earn extra money through a channel and writing books, how to forage and search for free goods and thrift shop. I have enjoyed every moment of it.

However, I’m feeling like it’s time to create more wealth. It’s time that I, as the great mother of this house, start doing good things for me. I want vacations where I get waited on and cooked for. I want to travel far, far away. Not to Oregon. To Europe. I want to get these kids out of here and see the world and see that it goes far beyond watching gamers on YouTube and the little dramas at the coop school.

And I want some luxury and opulence in our life. I want to meet interesting people and explore old cities.

We may have limited funds but once a year we have a tiny fortune from the IRS and it’s time to use it for fun. After years of working hard and preparing for hard times that never come, let us prepare for good times and great voyages and fun travel.

There are ways to travel well and not cost a fortune.

As I reinvent myself, I have to replace old ideas, old thinking and old habits. Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”

If you want a new life, you have to change everything, especially your old thinking and beliefs. It takes daily focus and practice.

For example, I want to be healthy, slim and fit. I watch plant based cooking videos and interviews with vegans and raw vegans to inspire me and learn to cook differently. I cleaned out my pantry, fridge and chest freezer and I filled it all with clean, plant based foods. Every time I go to the store I have to race by the chip isle and avoid the cookie isle. I settle into the produce isle and stock up in the grain and bean isle. I buy used vegan cook books and I have learned how to make everything from faux meat out of gluten or walnuts to gooey cheese out of silken tofu. I found a free Marcy Home Gym and saved up for a small elliptical. I found my old weights and washed them up.

I’m getting healthier and more fit every day. Still not slim, but it’ll happen, how could it not with all the lifestyle changes I’m making?

I wanted to get back to writing fiction so I started reading books on writing from good authors I respect. I went back to reading great fiction and I made up an action plan. I repainted and decorated my office. I removed unnecessary distractions. Then I did the hardest part. I got my bum in the chair and started writing.

Fifteen years ago I quit drinking and smoking. I moved to a new town, made new sober friends, did new sober activities, watched different movies, listened to different music, threw sober pot lucks, surrounded myself with everything clean and healthy, did the spiritual and emotional work to heal myself, changed my diet and exercise to heal my body and lungs. I threw myself into it 100% and it paid off. You couldn’t pay me to drink or smoke a cigarette today.

Everytime I changed a big part of my lifestyle, I had to remove something or several things and I had to replace them with other things that were matching the new lifestyle. I quit drinking and smoking and replaced them with a healthy diet and long walks on the beach with my dog. I lost old friends because party people don’t want sober people around, so I replaced them with healthy, clean living people.

Today I don’t want to live like a pauper anymore. I will always be wise with the money and frugality should help you thrive. Frugal means you live within your means so you have a stress free life and can ride the waves of recessions. It shouldn’t create an obsession with being cheap or poverty consciousness. I have realized I have that.

Today I made an old bread recipe. It’s honey wheat but I’m so cheap that I cut out the butter and honey to save money. I renamed it peasant bread. It should be called “dry as hell” bread. But today I felt rich and I added the honey and the butter and we have a moist, delicious bread for dinner with our soup.

It has started me on a new path toward great fortune and a rich life. I always say, don’t save the china and candles. Use the china even to eat the mornings eatmeal. Light the candles and have warm glow in the rooms. And now I add to that, use the honey and butter in your bread. Use that tax return to travel to Europe. Can you image how luxurious you will start feeling?

I feel excited and it has pulled me out of the doldrums.

Well, time to brew a little espresso and plan our trip.

Learning To Write Through Observation And Study

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I’m sitting here at my laptop finishing up a little frugal lifestyle book I’ll be throwing out in the world soon. I took a moment to stare out my window at the trees and looming storm on the horizon. I have some Blues playing and this passionate song came on by Teddy Swims. I just tuned into a line, “skin between my teeth, can’t see the forest for the trees, I’m down on my knees.”

Pretty intense and all of this mans longing in this relationship is summed up in one sentence.

Songs are a great way to learn writing. The song has to convey everything in a few minutes. The whole story, all the emotions are there in a few lines and repetitive chorus. These short musical stories touch us deeply and stay with us for a long time.

Movies are another great way to learn story telling. I watch movies all the time. I have dabbled in screen writing but I’m not there just yet. I have a great book, The Screenwriters Bible by David Trottier. Seven pages in and I felt like I had consumed a semester at a great writing college. I invested in Finale Draft and did start a screenplay. I have the whole outline done except that the ending got complicated and a monkey wrench was thrown in the whole gig. When I figure out that one little part, I will be able to finish.

Until then I pick up my phone repeatedly as if Tom Cruise might text me at any moment and I over snack and talk to Molly, the dog, in that annoying baby voice that gets dogs all wiggly and thinking that there may be a promise of a walk or treat in that high pitched garble.

I have books to study and stories to write, but I find it easier to take up a look out at my desk window. I watch the squirrels navigate the fence, someone ride by on a bike, the birds ride the air above the sugar pines. Or what ever tree because my TreeSnapp app didn’t help me at all. That’s the other thing I do; add apps I never use or order things I later have to take out of the cart because we have a zero budget for extras.

I get caught up in reading books about writing instead of just doing it. Just Do It-Nike. True, true, true.

By the way, the movie about Nike and Michael Jordan is a very inspirational one. Air is the title.

Trumbo is also an inspiring movie and about a writer. Trumbo was a successful screenwriter black listed and jailed in the late 1940’s for being a communist. He was able to overcome and continue writing under pen names and got work for his fellow screenwriters also black listed. He wrote great movies such as Roman Holiday. In later years, he called out all the witch hunters that had denied him and his fellow artist the right to work because of paranoia and political prejudice. As a writer this movie is a hit.

Speaking of ordering things we don’t need, two books arrived; Save The Cat Writes A Novel by Jessica Brody and Shut Up And Write The Book by Jenna Moreci. Both books received rave reviews. But how many books does a person need to learn how to write?

In Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg, she talks of this very thing, of how we spend so much time reading about writing instead of writing! I have to chuckle on this. I have been guilty of this very thing. I’ve been reading endlessly the writing How To’s. Anne Lamott, Steven King, K.M. Weiland, Jessica Lourey and Viki King. I have a full shelf of writing manuals. I don’t know if they have made my writing better, but they have made me feel scholarly. I can feel smart while I don’t write.

I had a writing slump recently. After years of producing books like a crazy person, some thirty four books in nine years, I didn’t produce for almost two years. I wanted to but when I sat at my writing desk, I would doodle or do a Chakra card spread or make a phone call. For two years. I quit my YouTube channel, thinking that must be the problem. It was taking up a lot of time and thought, but I still didn’t write. I watched movies about writers; Isn’t She Great, Trumbo, Please Stand By. Any movie that had someone writing. I watched them over and over, just playing in the background as I doodled and tried to find answers in a card spread.

I did write during this time but mostly about my feelings about not writing stories.

What broke the spell was finding a story idea and outline in my files that I had done years ago. I wrote up the story and published it recently. It’s short and just a lite little read for someone to pass time on the train, but it got me to write again and it got me back to writing fiction.

The problem is not being able to think up stories. It’s that I get stuck somewhere in the middle or toward the end. How to get to the end and make sense, that’s the mystery. Someone needs to write a book about that. The minute I get stuck in the mud, I walk away. When you get a car stuck in the mud, you put a board under the tire and drive out. Finding the board on an isolated road at night can be a challenge.

I’m going forward to work on a new book but I think I’ll read three more books on writing before that happens. And brew more coffee.

Maybe do an Angel spread.

Back In The Saddle Of Fictional Writing

Finally, after five long years, I’m returning to fictional writing after so long and some 22 plus books on home and frugal lifestyle writing.

This is the first novelette, published last night. It is a short and lite read for the commute to work. I had to do a simple writing to get back into the saddle. I found this story idea in my old files. I must have thought it up a few years ago and wiped up a quick outline. My past self did this for my future self, somehow knowing that getting into fiction is like rock climbing with limited skills. It gets easier but, as a writer, I need all the help I can get.

Thank you past self.

So, I find this story idea, the quick outline and the first chapter was even started for me. I still struggled a bit. But here it is. The story is fun. A little mystery, a little implied romance. If you are looking for deep kissing and passionate dialogue, this is not it. But the characters are charming and it is a little page turner.

It is about three people, Paul who has a drinking problem because of a loss in the past and a secret he keeps to himself. Emma, who thinks she has met her future husband but has no idea who this guy really is because he has created a façade. And then there is Jeff who is not who he pretends to be, not one bit and he has quite the past.

It is a quick read. I was ready to be done, to be honest. I have so many other ideas now that the doors are open wide and the energy is flowing. I’m eager to sink my typing fingers into a big piece of juicy work.

I started my writing career almost nine years ago on a cheap laptop. My husband saw me feverishly click clacking away on a decrepit computer at the kitchen table so, on one of our trips to Costco, he picked up a new $300 HP laptop for me to begin my new obsession. And begin I did. I was prolific the first two years. I learned of KDP and how to publish on my own for free and that was it. I whipped up book after book. I wrote frugal and then I started on fiction. I’m not saying it was good stuff, but I was in my element.

I remember reading interviews by famous authors. I wanted advice and the advice given was always the same: read a lot and write a lot. We had a beautiful yellow library within walking distance and next to it were two big, incredible children’s parks. Everyday, weather permitting, I would push a double stroller to this library and we would play at both parks, enjoy the rose garden on the side of the library and then spend time in the library reading and filling a bag with novels for me and fairy tales for the boys.

Between all the rituals of the day; tidying up the house, naps, cooking, reading time, nap time, bath time…I would read and write. I even invested in a treadmill we shoved against the living room wall and I would put in an hour of walking and reading or think about my stories and what I would do with that chapter and this ending and that character.

I had a lot of insecure thoughts and lacked any self esteem back then, but I think back on that time with such happy nostalgia. I had adorable toddlers and we had delicious routines, and I felt so alive and driven with my writing.

I started a blog then as well. Right here on WordPress. I collected a lot of my community with that blog. I can’t remember how they found me but they did and they later joined me on YouTube when I started a channel.

Then I took on too much and life changed and the list of jobs and chores and duties piled high. We bought our first little house for a song and dance and spent a couple years fixing it up and turning weedy lawns into kitchen gardens with apple, almond, and mandarin trees. I started a YouTube channel and was homesteading in town along with writing books, blogging and filming. Pretty soon I only wrote about, talked about, and filmed homemaking and frugality and I left fiction behind.

I tried several times over the years to take it back up. I had written four fictional books, actually five because the first book had to be completely rewritten, it was so bad. But those were all within the first two years. I wrote another novel during NaNoWriMo some five years ago, but then that was it. I couldn’t do it. My mind was stuck on homemaking.

We moved to this mountain town and this old house and it’s been another three years of fixing it up, gardening, planting an orchard, homeschooling, and tending to three dogs, two of which were becoming geriatric. I took on way, WAY too much and burnt out over and over before I read Essentialism, by Greg McKeown and got a clue. I’ve been on a downsizing and simplifying mission ever since.

Right now the kids are in a coop school part time, so the stress of homeschooling has been somewhat lifted. Both elder dogs have passed and, though I miss hearing them in the yard alerting me with every passersby, it is another weight lifted. I have left my channel and other hustles and whittled it down.

I now have two task: mothering and writing. Of course it’s all under the umbrella of homemaking but I love homemaking so it’s easy. It’s work and it does interrupt my writing, but I enjoy every aspect of it. Except cleaning the bathroom. I wouldn’t mind outsourcing that.

When I felt overwhelmed and burnt out and I couldn’t go back to fiction no matter how I tried, I began to reminisce over how it was the first two years and I began to return to that way of life. I returned to just the writing and now another blog. I returned to having no other hustles and staying off the internet. I didn’t even get what YouTube was back then. I knew it was there and a friend and I had made videos some twelve years back, but I didn’t really understand it and YouTube was rustic back then. And that was for the best. No internet or YouTube scrolling left a lot of time to read and write and be with children. I have gone back to that and all our lovely routines. They are a bit different now as the boys aren’t one and three years, they are ten and twelve years. I have more time as they like to do their things and can even cook a little and fend for themselves with some things, bath themselves and walk to the store if they choose.

Here I am, back to the old days. I have confidence now. I’ve written thirty four plus books in nine years, only twenty eight are still shelved. The earlier books are clumsy and sometimes dry, but I have improved vastly over the years and so it is true what they say, the more you write and the more you read, the more you hone your skills as a writer.

Cheers!

A Natural and Unplugged Home

I’m obsessed with the environment and I get so upset with how we trash and abuse the Great Mother. I have decided to not think about it anymore. I’ll just do what I can to have my family live more naturally and with more respect and kindness to the planet and all the humans and creatures on this planet.

I am no longer checking YouTube. I am no longer on social media and haven’t been for years. It was a wonderful thing to delete all my accounts and be free of all that comparing and judging, gossip and dramas, my own jealousies or seeing the false lives people would put up on their Facebook and Instagram. I can just mind my own business and be happy and a nicer person.

Recently, I left my channel and I try not to go on YT at all because there is always some upsetting thing in my feed. I do like watching vegan or plant based cooking and I watch new age New World videos. I’m fascinated with Dolores Cannon and other Universes and a coming new age. But when I go on YouTube, I have to know exactly what I’m getting on their for so I don’t get led down a dark alley and emotionally stabbed a few times.

I don’t watch news or read it, I’ve made my email into an app so I can get straight on there and skip the articles and all that click bate. I use Ecosia as a search engine, because it plants trees and doesn’t do the gossip sites. I have built a bubble around my life. My kids step out of it all the time and they are young and into this worldly stuff. I tune it out.

The other night I had some insight. We are all here to accomplish something. We come with our karma and our chosen destinies. I worry about everything, thus I have to create some isolation for my sanity. But I realized, we are like individual movies or sets in Hollywood. Each set has a story they are filming. There are actors and they have their lines and roles, the story unfolds accordingly. I am on my own set and have my role and my lines. I wouldn’t run from set to set and try to be all those actors and learn all the lines, right? I need to stay on my set and just focus on my role in my story. That way I can be a good leading lady in my movie.

This helped me stay in my own lane.

We can do so much as individuals to create a better life and serve the Earth and others. We don’t think we make an impact but think of all the great hero’s and heroines that made big changes in history; Rosa Parks, Joan of Arc, Mother Teresa, Lao Tzu. And what is that saying by the Dalai Lama, “if you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.”

We have planted so many trees and flowers in our yard. We have Holly trees and Trees Of Heaven that have berries for the birds in the Winter and blossoms in Summer for the bees and dragon flies. We have bird baths and feeders to support the birds and I planted extra nut trees for my sweet squirrels. We don’t use any chemicals or pesticides so the birds can feast on the bad bugs in the garden and not be harmed. The soil has become rich and alive over the years of amending and healing it.

I bought my first bar of shampoo wrapped in paper at the health food store the other day. I love this shampoo bar! It suds better than the liquid shampoo and my hair still smells great days later. I’m quickly switching out the plastic containers of everything I buy to glass, paper or cloth and reusable. I will be getting conditioner bars soon as I use up the supply I have. I now buy sheets or powder laundry soap in cardboard boxes or paper containers. Today I found a mascara cake, like the stuff our grandmothers used in the 1930’s. You can use it for mascara, liner and eyebrow filler and the wand is reusable, the cake refillable.

I walk through my kitchen, laundry and bathroom and look at each item and look for replacements. We have a Berkey water filter so we haven’t bought bottled water in years and have saved up to $5,000 a year on bottled water and saved on hundreds of pounds of plastic. I will be buying Calgon in a cardboard box from now on to replace my bubble bath and if I shop at the natural food stores, I can buy the produce in my cotton bags.

It’s something I think about and have to make decisions every time I shop. It takes time and patience. I’ve been raised in a plastic, fast food era. Now I age in an internet, social media era. The struggle is daily and real.

I unplugged the internet for a couple years. We would check out a Hot Spot from the library now and then. A Hot Spot is a small modem that plugs into the wall and you have wireless. We would check it out for two weeks at a time. But other than that, we were free of all the noise and bombardment of information. I played musicals and Opera, the local radio station that would grace us with some Mountain Blue Grass. We watched DVD’s I would find at the thrift store for a dollar or the library. We spent more time reading, swimming, walking to town, talking, and cooking. It seemed we did so much when we didn’t have internet.

Now we have internet again and we watch TV. And more TV.

However, now that I have a writing schedule and I stay off my phone, off YT, I’m returning to that old fashioned world when we did stuff instead of watched stuff. We turned to books for information instead of scrolling videos. I have SO many books on everything from gardening, cooking, homemaking, biographies of interesting characters such as Samuel Pepys and Jane Austin, and Spiritual books. I truly don’t need to be on the internet for anything at this time.

To encourage my shift away from the internet, I invested in packs of highlighters and book tabs so I can annotate books like a true mad scholar. I have become a tad addicted to annotating since discovering it a few seasons back. I annotate cookbooks, my history books, my book by Wayne Dyer on the Tao Te Ching, even my chakra cards. I have taken to annotating in the tub or going to bed early to tab away.

Cooking from scratch saves on plastic. Saves a ton of money. Our grocery bill could get up to a $1,000 or more when we were making more money and I would buy many premade and packaged meals and snacks. Now It’s half that and going down. Yes, our pantry is boring as all get out, but I can make magic with some flour and seasoning. I can make milks and sauteed gluten steaks, vegan cakes, vegan cheese sauces, and perogies from beans and potatoes, bouillons and cashews.

If you want the house to smell good, simmer a pan of water with cinnamon sticks and cloves.

Alright, well, off to bed with a book and highlighter.

Writing Down The Bones

Yesterday was a long day. I’ve been on a mission to beautify this whole house, room by room. With each room I have been purging, tidying, deep cleaning and decorating them into bohemian coziness and warmth. I completed the last room yesterday.

Along with that, I started this blog and that was no easy task, as I’m technically disabled and it took three days, trying out four different blog sites, several mood swings intertwined within many daylight and evening hours. I finally settled on this site. This site is an old friend. I had a blog on here for years. So, we are now back together.

I am not sure it’s a wise endeavor for a writer to have a blog since it takes time and energy away from writing books. However, it is a wonderful way to share and express my daily thoughts and workings. I miss YouTube and this is an outlet. It is also suggested that a writer do a daily writing that has nothing to do with novel writing. So, we have that.

After a day of setting up and beautifying the last room on the list, I made two pasta dishes for dinner (chow mien and a garlic vegan butter pasta since not everyone was thrilled with the chow mien), got the blog started up and running, did some hours of editing and proof reading on the fiction book I’ll have published soon, and I’m done with the long day!

I get into pajamas, dish up some chow mien and get ready to watch the last two episodes of Resident Alien, my new addiction, and suddenly a dispute breaks out with the father and eldest. It quickly escalates into a court room battle with the other child jumping in, and the chicken coop erupts into cawing and crowing.

I realize that I won’t be treating myself to Resident Alien and I’ve lost my appetite. I try to not get involved because I have control issues and I am adopting Tabitha Browns mantra of “That’s not my business. This is my business and that isn’t my business”. I did have to interject a few words to calm the mob, but then I went to my room with a book, a highlighter and tabs to do some nighttime annotating.

I received this book yesterday in the mailbox. I had earned enough points on Thriftbooks for a free book under $5. This was the only book on writing and outlining under $5. I read a couple good reviews and ordered it. It turns out it was a gift from the Universe. It’s one of those things that you think will be a simple book you’ll skim and throw on the book shelf to collect dust, but it’s a clever gift to inspire and support the work.

I started with the preface, I don’t usually read the preface of any book. I dive in and skim, sometimes I don’t even finish even if I do like the book. But I felt like I wanted to give this book a 100% chance and start from the very beginning.

What a delight! I’m read the preface and now I’m a few pages into the introduction and I’m in love. Natalie Goldberg takes writing into a spiritual practice and healing realm and I am already inspired, I have barely skimmed the book and I feel the ambition rising.

She talks about working with a Zen master for six years with her meditations and at one point he says to her, “Why do you come to sit meditation? Why don’t you make writing your practice? If you go deep enough in writing, it will take you everyplace.”

It is true. Writing is a practice of meditation, healing, escape, and delving into a made up world or our own subconscious.

It is a portal to other realities and a friend waiting to do therapy with you.

When I get through the whole book, I will return with the final review. You can also join me on Goodreads.

Reinventing Oneself

Welcome to my blog. This is a place for me to come and share all I’m learning and exploring in the world of writing, creating, even homemaking, because homemaking is something I hold very dear. Homemaking is creating a sanctuary for my family and myself so we can thrive and create art, stories, healing, and community.

I have plenty to share, so where to begin. Some of you who come here will already know me and my family. Some of you will be new.

Let’s start with a brief introduction that won’t bore you into a snooze.

I’m a mother first, and writer second. Both children and writing are my loves. My hobby is homemaking. It’s strange to describe a job that way, but, as Confucius said, “Choose a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”. I love homemaking. I used to have doll houses as a child and I would make outdoor homes and tents, I would decorate and nest in my rooms, I decorated every apartment and studio I ever had. I always did it on a small budget so I got pretty good at foraging and hunting down free goodies and thrift sales.

I’ve always loved writing, movies, theater, and reading novels, sometimes reading the same ones over and over. I now love to watch certain movies that inspire me over and over. I learn and heal through books and movies. I heal and expand through my writing.

I’ve been on a mission to unplug and get back to a slower more 1970’s style life. In saying a 1970’s style, I mean to return to the days when the phone was attached to the wall and not the palm of our hands and we made do with and took care of what we had, there was no Amazon to meet every sudden urge or want. Back when you had limited channels, often working with an antenna on the roof and three channels and we made most of our meals at home from simple ingredients.

It’s not easy to go all the way back but I have unplugged and changed many things in our household over the last couple years. I will share this in further blogs.

I’ve also recently taken a break from a YouTube channel to focus on family and my writing. I’m in a sort of Monk Mode. I’m isolating a little bit to reinvent myself and my writing.

In so doing, we have reduced the monthly income and I am pulling out all my tricks of frugality and spending some extra energy foraging for things we want or need on free sites, free things I find on the street, and thrift stores. I have learned to work with everything we already own to beautify our home and taken up a plant based diet for our health and to save money and the planet.

There is a time to decide what we love and believe in the most and let everything else fall away. This goes for jobs, hustles, people, relationships, schedules, furniture, paper work, junk…even cleaning out our cell phones and email boxes. I have been downsizing and clearing out everything that is not beautiful and purposeful, putting my attention on the main priorities; children and writing.

It is not easy to shift from one way of being to rebuilding yourself anew, but it is fun and creative. It just takes time to stop missing what we know and embrace the new and enjoy the process of rebuilding a life that meets you where you are now.

I hope you join me.