Welcome Back!

So it’s been about a year since I posted.

Yeah, I know.

2016 had been an extremely busy year. I had been dealing with a huge elder care issue that had consumed masses of time (a family member with dementia that had to be moved out of independent housing and into an assisted living, all their belongings sorted and moved, lots of coordination between family members-doctors-and facility done).  The Walmart Moms program had wound down after 8 years. They were my biggest paying client, so I was scrambling to do as much work as they offered right up to the end.  I put feelers out to other clients and was working some of the blogger networks to try to pick up other work, but it seemed like every available opportunity was for millennial bloggers.  At 44, I was about a decade too old for that demographic.

Then there was all the regular life stuff to juggle with active teenagers, a husband, a dog, a household. . . for several years I had been doing just enough to keep it all from tumbling down on me, but no more.

Quite frankly, the house was a wreck.  We aren’t just talking “lived in”, I have aspirations for my house to be a magazine spread.  It really was bad enough that I was completely embarrassed to have anyone stop unannounced.  I was frequently stressed trying to keep up with everything which caused me to be  irritable and short tempered with the kids.  I felt like I was always yelling at someone about something, and that there was never enough of me to get everything done.  When my work dried up, the idea of diving in and spending hours and hours pitching people to try to find new clients while the holiday season approached was giving me heartburn.

So I just stopped.

At first I figured that after the holidays were over I’d get back to it. . . but then January came and went and I realized that I just needed to take a good, solid sabbatical and get my life back on track.

So instead of writing, I got the house organized and cleaned. . . at least the downstairs.  I can now have someone over without having to hide boxes of things to be sorted and stored, or having piles of paperwork on every surface.  The vacuuming and dusting (I never used to dust unless we were having a party) is being done on a semi weekly basis, which actually means it is taking less time.  The laundry, which always used to be piled up in baskets in the living room and study (looking sloppy and getting full of wrinkles) now is done and taken upstairs once a week.  I rarely yell at the kids and I’ve been able to enjoy evenings relaxing with my husband.  I started a teen youth group for the church, have gotten more involved with the drama productions at the high school, and have been able to make a point of getting together with some of my rarely seen friends more often.

Everything isn’t done–my guest room and craft room upstairs still have boxes of stuff to be gone through, and I seem to find 3 projects I want to do for every hour of time I free up.  For example right now I have a bunch of beef tallow I rendered once down in the fridge waiting for it’s final rendering and filtering, I bought 5 large cabbages that are waiting to be made into sauerkraut, the last of the zuchetta squash is in the basement and needs to be shredded and dehydrated, I’ve got two 6 gallon carboys of wine on the kitchen counter that need to be bottled, a gallon of homemade cider vinegar in my front entry way (I didn’t want the vinegar near the wine) that also needs to be bottled up, there are greens and carrots still in the garden. . . well you get the idea.  A million projects to get to still.

But life is on a more even keel, and so I’m back!

My posting will probably be a bit slow at first–I’m going to aim for a couple of times a week.  But I’m looking forward to hearing from all of you again, and sharing the things I’ve found interesting or enlightening over the last year!