January was a month! For our family it saw an ear infection, croup, cutting a first tooth, vomit, pneumonia, pink eye, and a run of the mill cold. (You kind of want to go take a shower and change into clean clothes now after reading that sentence, don’t you?) Needless to say, I’m ready for February and to move on to greener pastures.
Because this past month was full of sickness, I spent a lot of time just surviving. When that happens, I notice we put a few more than usual trash bags out to the curb which brings me to an important lesson in less waste living. There will be times when you don’t do as good of a job as you usually do or as you would like to and it might make you feel like crap as you watch all the trash going into your garbage can. It happens to the best of us. But the important thing is to not stay there, wallowing in your garbage. Instead, when you’re able to stand back up on your feet, get up, brush yourself off and get back on that horse! Don’t feel guilty for that time but use your renewed energy to resume your good work and when you’re able, maybe find one more practice you can add.
One of the resolutions I had for this month was to eat through the food cupboard and freezer and we did it! Honestly, being sick helped with this because none of us had the desire to go out to the grocery store. I was concerned about the quality of the meals we would be eating but turned out, there was some pretty stellar frozen food in there that I had forgotten about. The highlight was many pounds of venison steak our neighbor had given us. That being said, I’m glad it’s over because I was serving up some pretty interesting meals toward the end and was excited to get back to the grocery and butcher.
A little explanation for the pictures? The granola is the granola I make for our Airbnb guests upon their arrival. We have opened ours back up again after the birth of the baby and the construction so granola has been going on heavy in the kitchen these days (made with extremely clean hands, by the way). The paintings are Lucy’s that I’ve been using to decorate the new main floor bedroom as I am trying not to buy new things as much as possible. Andrew helped her with one and I wasn’t going to tape it up because it was a lot of his work but he kept asking me to so I finally relented. The chicken broth can with a slit in the top is my “sharps bank” for my Merkur double edge razor. I was going to do a whole post about it and decorate it to look somewhat attractive but laughed after I put the slit in the top because I had zero desire to do anything more to it. So, if you’re wanting to make one here’s what you do: Buy the cheapest can of broth you can find, cut a slit in the top of it, empty out the broth and put your used razors in it and then take it to the recycling center a few years later when it’s full.
That’s it for now. This feels like one of the lamest/worst written posts to date but it is what it is. Hope you are doing well and that you’re staying strong with your less waste resolutions. But if you’re not, that’s ok too. Just get back to it when you can!