Cabin Crafted

Tag: sharing

  • Wins and Losses

    No, I’m not talking about FIFA Soccer, though that is on every public television in every place in town, including the grocer.

    Ten months ago, we needed new phones and instead of dealing with the provider I had been with since moving to the mountains with no contract, we switched.  That was an epic fail.  Since our switch, my phone has had to be replaced because it wouldn’t hold a charge and would get so hot that I couldn’t put it in my pocket and we have had spotty to no service on our property and in our house.  About 3/4 of all calls do not ring, and we may or may not get a voicemail eventually.  To have any success making a call, we have to stand on our back deck. We have had two incidents in recent weeks where one of us tried to call the other from our land to our house or from the top of our driveway to the yard and the calls haven’t gone through.  Both times were emergency situations, not life threatening, but situations that required the other immediately.  We picked this service because of their advertisement about coverage.  This is what we have most of the time.

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    Zero service, no bars, just the universal symbol for NO.  Today we decided we had had enough and returned to the place we bought the phones and signed the contract to complain and possibly get out of the two year contract 14 months early.  After dealing with a testy young man who finally after about 15 minutes of automated attempts to connect with a service tech, put Jim on the phone with the tech.  We don’t know if we got anywhere or not, but allegedly they are going to work on it.  As we don’t have a land line and as we are seniors working a small farm, and Jim riding a motorcycle and me traveling to babysit a few times a year, we need reliable cell service.  If they can’t make this right, we may have to take the hit and cancel the contract early to go back to the provider that works on this mountain.  This may be a loss.

    The win is the soap.  It isn’t pretty, sure couldn’t sell it at a fair or the Farmers’ Market, but it lathers nicely and smells good.  There are 25 bars in two essential oil scents curing in the spare bedroom.

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    We will have plenty of soap for our use for a while, and to share with any of our children that want some bars.  The two batches reinforced some lessons from my mentor.  I reformulated the lye solution concentrate for the preferred of the two recipes to make it more superfatted using a lye calculator and wrote the recipe down where I can find it again, along with reminders about measuring everything by weight next time.  I consider this a win.

  • A Blog is a Blog

    Blogs take on many forms I have realized as I read more and more of them.  Some are religious in nature, some trying to promote someone’s business, a few are story tellers, many are online journals.

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    I tried journal writing beginning the year I moved to the mountains, alone, to help supervise the construction of our retirement log home on a small farm and to unretire from education and reenter the school counseling field for another 3 1/2 years until my hubby had finally sold his practice, retired and moved into our home with me.  For three years, we had visited back and forth across the state, hard on the cars and our emotions.  I thought journal writing would provide me with the necessary outlet, but I couldn’t get my thoughts down on paper fast enough and looking back at my efforts, it was mostly a pity party and complaints.  I had retired from Virginia Beach City schools as a school counselor in 2004.  This was just about the time that the state mandated testing set in motion by No Child Left Behind was starting to have teeth, affecting whether a child could graduate with a diploma or just leave school after 12 years with a Certificate of Attendance.  The Testing Director for the city at that time had met with all of the counselors by school and told us that if there was a mistake made, that it would be our names in the paper, not his.  I was dedicated to my job, a good counselor, a stickler for details when it came to record keeping and I also ran the Advanced Placement Testing program for our school, being responsible to the students, their parents who paid dearly for those tests and to the College Board, who took their exam process very seriously.  That meeting was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I decided that since I had enough cumulative years and age to retire from the school system, that I would quietly go at the end of the school year.  I was burned out, stressed.  For the next two years, I worked a part time job for a non profit organization, but the third year, it would no longer be part time, and our house was under construction, thus my move.  I was hired by the adjacent county’s school system as the lead counselor in a high school, again in charge of AP testing, but now also in charge of the Standard’s of Learning (yep SOL) testing for the school.  My stress level again rose, the paper journal writing was not doing it for me, so I started using a feature in Facebook called notes.  Then your posts in Facebook were limited to a set number of words.

    About 3 or 4 years ago, I discovered blogging. This was the outlet I had been seeking, a place where I could journal, be creative, and put down the info quickly enough to get my thoughts on paper, you see, I type much faster than I could ever write by a factor of 4 or 5.  My blog is my journal.  I do publish it in a few places and yes, I like to see if anyone is reading it, but it is really for me, my journal writing outlet.  Blogging helped me through the years until I retired with my hubby permanently and has continued as a creative outlet, a place to publish knitting patterns that I create, a place to write about the life on our little homestead, a place to share the new things we learn.

    What is a blog?  It is personal to each and every blogger.  I love reading those of others and I keep adding more and more to my daily list to check for new posts but I shall continue to blog as my personal journal.