I realized recently that it has been over a year since I’ve
posted about this house that is now our home.
We have been in this house 15 ½ months.
The time has flown. It often feels
like we’ve just moved in, while other times we find ourselves saying things
like “a couple of summers ago…” as if we’ve been here for years. Technically, I guess, we can now say that we’ve
been here for “years”. In that time, we
have made improvements to our new home.
We’ve textured the concrete on the patio and the front walk way to help
keep it cool(er) in the summer heat, furnished three spare bedrooms, bought an
outdoor patio dining set and added a sun screen on the west side of the
patio. Our most recent update is to put
in wood shelves to replace the cheap and almost useless white wire shelving in
the kitchen pantry. Where we upgraded a
lot of features of the house during the build process, we went with some
cheap/free options that we knew we either didn’t care about or would upgrade
ourselves. Pantry and closet
shelves/racks are one of those features.
I now have wonderful wood shelves with more room to stock food and house
the ever growing pile of “must have kitchen gadgets”.
Another change we’ve made in this last year and half is to
eat healthier. Granted, we ate out a lot
at the beginning, mainly because we were living at the hell motel. We also wanted to try places that were new to
us and sample the local fare. Once we were
moved in, we slowly got back to eating at home, mostly, and tried our hand at a
small garden. With a much different
climate than we are use to (we came from Colorado to Texas), I wanted to start
small and see what would grow well and what wouldn’t. Our summer was mainly mild until August but
it was dry throughout and I had to watered daily. Eventually it was just too hot and too dry
for a lot of what we planted. This year,
I hope to put out a larger garden with more heat tolerant crops and pray that
the rain gods give us a break.
Part of my poor little 1st garden. This box was mainly lettuce.
This year we plan to make more changes to our diet. We’ve started cutting out a lot of processed
food and we rarely eat out. The holidays
this past year was the exception as we had company for most of the weeks from
Thanksgiving through New Years, but we still ate at home for the most
part. We generally eat dinner around
5:30 and for a while I ate nothing after 8pm.
We always have a salad with our meal, even when going out. Now we have a freezer stocked with lean pork
(from our own ranch), beef and chicken and I’m already planning out this year’s
garden that I’ll get going in the next few weeks. That’s the beauty of south Texas; you can
grow things almost year round. So this
is our year of Healthy Living. I want to
learn all I can about the foods we eat e.g. health benefits and the best way to
grow our own. I cringe every time we go
to the grocery store, mainly because it’s a mad house and because it seems like
we spend $100 every time we go whether it’s for a few days’ groceries or for
weeks.
I’m currently reading up on different types of greens. Now is the time to plant lettuce and as much
salad as we eat, that will be an important item in the garden. Everyone seems to be on a kale kick these
days. I like kale but there are many
other greens I enjoy as well. Romaine
and butter bib lettuces are what we tend to buy. Now I
just need to make sure that the neighborhood cat that keeps sleeping in my
garden bed stays away. It has decided
that my garden is a great place to take a nap.
I don’t agree.
