Joy of Cooking Post - a recap of some faves this year

Baked Chicken, Spinach Fettucine and Fresh Tomato Sauce

Grogu Sugar Cookies for May the Fourth

Nachos for Alex's Birthday

Panko Chicken, Angel Hair Pasta and Arugula

Pork Tenderloin with Roasted Potatoes and Brussels Sprouts

Roasted Beets and Feta with Mixed Greens

Smokin' Southwest - Fast Pantry Nachos

 

For those nights when the fridge stock is lacking, you can't be bothered to put any effort in at all and just really want to get to the part where you sit in front of the screen and watch something. 

We take a couple trivets downstairs to our Den, put the baking sheet on them and dig in like the uncultured heathens we sometimes are, forks optional but nice when you get to the soggier chips in the middle at the end.  

 

Rotisserie chicken from Costco, Rotel and Smokin' Southwest

Why yes, that is a margarita.

This is me.

Fifty years old! My generation abhorred being labeled, and yet applied them to ourselves and others with reckless abandon. Nerd, jock, stoner, freak, popular, dweeb...the list goes on and on. Of the many labels I have assigned myself in the last 25 years: wife, daughter, granddaughter, mother, driver, event planner, volunteer coordinator, homesteader, work at home business owner, cook, janitor, and a myriad of other titles as needed, the largest over looming identity has been sixteen years of identifying as a homeschooling mom. With the graduation of my youngest on May 28th, that role has run its course. It is so surreal to not be starting fall semester. It is beyond strange to not be looking at curriculum or signing up for museum events or considering what travel we might do that will also take us near someplace interesting and educational. 

Not that all learning stops, of course, that will never be the case, but just that I'm not really responsible for what it looks like going forward is giving me some very odd vibes. I'm trying to be careful with myself and my known tendency to jump into things before thinking or looking closely and not just jump from one frying pan into a different fire. Which also feels weird. Oddly grown up? It's only taken fifty years for me to consider self-limitations before committing to whatever anyone asks from me. No real point on this post, just ruminating a bit as I change profile pics and descriptions in all these places on-line that have stayed the same for years before because I had been the same for so long. The last three years have been life-changing, most of the time not in any way that I would have liked to be changed, but that is life itself - never predictable, always turbulent, ride atop the waves or crash below them. 

I know I say this every year, but maybe with my new-found grown-up-i-ness I will actually make it happen and post here more often. Maybe. At the very least one of the big things I want to do with my new free time (huzzah!) is get back into my shop more, so expect some bits about that, and hopefully I will have websites to share soon. 

It is so much harder this second time around, in a weird way. When I started Flutterby Designs over 20 years ago, I knew nothing, and just jumped in with both feet and hands without much thought except that I wanted to work for myself so that my family could come first. I made an absolute ton of mistakes, but that central principle always came through, including when we put it on hiatus for the middle/high school years because something had to give and my work was the thing that could be sacrificed the easiest. 

Now, trying to revive it is so much harder than I expected - there is so much more focus on on-line and social marketing - the last go around we were lucky to just have a website, as janky as it was, and a online shop that another work-at-home mom hosted. Luckily, no one expected perfection, we were just barely out of the days of geocity sites and a huge amount of my early business correspondence was done on AOL messenger. I still have a handful of AOL and MSN avatars I traded embroidery work for, created by one of the dozens of work-at-home moms I bonded with while typing one handed with a nursing babe on my lap. My first logo was clipart combined with Kristen ITC font and a little half circle swoop that took me hours to make in MS Publisher and even longer to make into a .gif using a free program one of those moms suggested. My first business cards required me taking the printed out and mocked up layout for them into the company that would be thermographing them in person, after establishing myself as a wholesale account with them. Everything was both much harder, and in some respects, so  much easier. We didn't know how much we didn't know. To say that it was a different world doesn't really do justice to just HOW different it is.

It's mid-July already!

 

Tools of today's work! I have been having a blast coming up with spice mixes to offer up at Fleischer Farms' stand the last several weeks and finally remembered to snag a pic today. Slogging away on a website revamp, ordering packaging supplies, designing...it feels like I am slowly coming back to life. That which doesn't kill us, blah, blah, blah. There is a whole lot of truth to it anyway, and I hope the stronger part is true, too. Lots and lots of changes coming up in the next two months, I hope to get back in the habit of gabbing here more often to sort out my own thought processes. Bear with me, or absolutely feel free to scroll by and get just the tidbits you need! I will be sorting out recipes and other informational things into a better searchable format so if you don't need the ramblings of a middle-aged mama, you don't have to wade through them. Blessings! bz

Oh, I only *thought* I had outdone myself.

The last two and half years have been a whole thesaurus worth of words describing challenge. I have, several times, had part of an update typed up and then decided against posting it for a myriad of reasons.

There have been many moments of heartache, anxiety, sorrow, fear and so much loss. Occasionally there have been moments of unexpected comfort and strength in spite of hardship. Even less often there have been chance moments of bittersweet joy.  Truly happy moments have been in super short supply. Suffice to say, it's been rough.  

Rather than dwell on what has been, what it has cost and what we have lost, I think a clean slate start is where my heart points. So, acknowledging that my last post left many things unfinished, and this one is leaving even more unsaid, let's go forward anyway! 

I've outdone myself

I've outdone myself on length of time between posts this time. Nearly four years. Things have changed so much I'm not sure just an update would even do it justice. I suppose I can start, just for ease, with an update on the bullet points from my last (long ago) post.

• Sara will be turning 18 this year. I'm about to have an adult kiddo. It feels a bit surreal.
• Alex is 9 inches taller than me.
• The crazy-never-ending-eleven-year-and-counting-remodeling project that is the Green Grass House in a nutshell still has an end in sight, but STILL isn't where we want it to be.
• We are (sort of) still homeschooling but have scaled back homesteading, too. This statement gives me some pause, and will need some more thinking and fleshing out, in another post.

For the next two bullets we take a serious jog to the side, because so much has changed, just in the last four weeks. 

• The family business, Roberts Sales, HAD grown by leaps and bounds every year for several years running and kept David good and busy, but slowed down the last two years, and, in unrelated news, is currently closed. Yes, closed.
• We currently have no fun things on our slate for this summer. In fact, we have no idea what summer will even look like at this point.

So, let's talk changes!  If I would have had myself together, I might have posted a January update, like so many years in the past, but even if I had, it wouldn't look like life right now. Since March 13, we have been on a stay at home order (school systems), that was greatly increased on March 25 (Denver non-essential businesses)  and again on March 26 (Jefferson County businesses). As of April 3, schools went to remote learning for the rest of the year. After seeing many folks suggest that keeping a journal of this time would be beneficial, or at least interesting historically, I decided to resurrect the ol' blog and chronicle things as they are . I'm going to start with a recap of the last few months on a world wide scale before delving back into what this means to our little homestead. Onward to the next post!

So many updates!

As always, I'm starting off apologizing for the long time between posts. And as always, I will try to be better, really I will :-) The short version of an update:

• I'm the mom of a teen now, Sara turned 13 in November!
• Alex is less than a half inch shorter than me, and will probably pass me this summer (He's 11)
• The crazy-never-ending-eight-years-and-counting-remodeling project that is the Green Grass House in a nutshell has an end in sight. 
• We are still homeschooling and homesteading, but have scaled back the work at home quite a bit to keep up with those other two!
• The family business, Roberts Sales, has grown by leaps and bounds every year for four years running and keeps David good and busy for a good portion of the summer.
• We have many fun things on our slate for this summer, and I hope to keep up here with sharing them with everyone!