Welcome to the Saturday morning edition of Simple Living This Week. I hope your week was pleasant and productive. Overall, we had a good week in our home.
This Week’s Artwork
Today’s piece is Grandfather Telling a Story by Daniel Ridgway Knight.
From Wikipedia (edited by me for brevity):
Daniel Ridgway Knight (1839 – 1924) was an American artist born in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.
Knight was a pupil at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, under Gleyre, and later worked in the private studio of Meissonier. After 1872 he lived in France, having a house and studio at Poissy on the Seine.
He painted peasant women out of doors with great popular success. He earned his first major distinction in France at the Paris Salon in 1882 with his large oil on canvas Un Deuil. He would go on to be awarded the silver medal and Cross of the Legion of Honor, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1889, and was made a Knight of the Royal Order of St. Michael of Bavaria, Munich, 1893, and receiving the gold medal of honor from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1893.[1]
He died in Paris. His son, Louis Aston Knight (1873–1948), was also known as a landscape painter.
I’ve used many of his works during this series of posts, but I didn’t start out citing the artist until I was well into the series. If you looked back through the posts, you would probably be able to pick out many or all of them. He has a very distinctive style.
Homeschooling
We’re on vacation this week so I didn’t do a lot. I did spend some time researching and praying about what we should do for the coming year.
While cleaning out my desk, I found the Downton Abbey page-a-day calendar pages I had kept. David bought me that kind of calendar for a couple of years. I saved the pages because there were many with interesting history background info. Now that Caroline and I have watched the series, I’m going to have us read through all the historical ones to add more depth to what we learned. I’ll scan all of the historical ones we read and keep a digital copy for our homeschool records.
Homemaking
We crossed off a number of projects around the house this week. David washed all the windows (inside and out) which makes everything better!
I washed all of our bedding (mattress enclosure, blankets, pillows, etc.). The last thing to do is the quilt and shams which will be washed today. Next week I’ll do Caroline’s.
I cleaned out my desk. It was already organized, but it was time to go through, weed out unnecessary things, and just generally tidy up.
This weekend I’m dehydrating frozen organic peas and carrots. I have a basic dehydrator very similar to this Ronco 5 tray. (Mine is much older!) I’ll store them in Mason jars.
I’m also using my Foodsaver vacuum sealer to store various peas, beans, rice, etc. in Mason jars (using the jar sealer attachments). I’ve found that this brand of vacuum food sealer bags works just as well as the name brand and it is significantly less expensive.
Next week is the week I hope to completely reorganize my kitchen. I find I need to do it every few years as Caroline gets older and our family life adjusts accordingly. One of our plans for the coming school year is for her to learn to make at least one new recipe a week so I want to organize things in a way that will work for us.
Work
I spent a few days redoing my posts for Sallie’s Rebuilding America. I’m very pleased with how they all turned out. Each episode is now labeled which makes it easy to go back and look for the big topics I discussed. As I discussed in Episode 33, we’ve covered a lot of ground since I started on March 1. If you’ve been listening to these as I’ve made them, you are months ahead of the rest of the country in terms of understanding what is going on.
I realized this weekend that my Forum recently passed 300,000 page views! When you think it is mostly just me sharing info with my relatively small group of readers (compared to other blogs and websites), I find that amazing. There are some topics in there that do very well with the search engines which is so interesting. I just started a new sub-forum today for Finding Pretty and Beautiful Women’s Clothing.
David and I are updating the A Quiet Simple Life Planner & Guidebook with the next set of calendars for the 2022-2023 school year. Hopefully the updated version will be available in the shop by Monday. If you’ve already purchased it, you will be able to download the updated version.
That’s it for today! I need some breakfast, but wanted to get this post up first thing. Since I couldn’t get back to sleep after the thunderstorm moved through, I just got up and started typing! I hope you’ll leave a comment and share what is going on in your home.