Late Winter Days at Home

Our little family has been busy with working, learning, and living during these late winter days. We’re under a winter weather advisory today with multiple inches of snow expected. The weather is expected to turn a bit warmer after this so I suspect this will be one of our last blasts of winter weather this year. I’m enjoying the lazy lake effect snowflakes coming down outside my windows.

Caroline decided she wanted to teach herself Swedish using the free Duolingo app so she started off on that adventure. We have multiple connections to Sweden including the fact that I have a Swedish heritage and she has some online gaming friends in Sweden. So these were the motivations for the interest in that particular language. She asked me if I wanted to work on a language and I told her I did.

I had already pulled up some learning German videos on CensorTube a few months back, but hadn’t found anything I liked. So I took the Duolingo placement test earlier this week. After these many years decades since studying two years of German at Michigan State, I was able to place in Level 7. Now that I’m in the language every day, I’m able to advance pretty rapidly as things come back to me. (I made some dumb mistakes in the placement test due to the passage of time.) David took one year of French in high school so he decided to do the French.

So we’re all doing our ten minute lessons every day. It’s fun to do something different. I have always wanted to learn another language beyond German, but there was never a good time for it. I lean toward Dutch or Swedish next. We’ll see how the German goes.

We’re currently without a dryer until the repairman can come next week. Caroline has been introduced to the interesting experience of line-dried towels that are stiff as a board. What a revelation! LOL! I don’t use fabric softener in my towels so they are very NOT soft.

I’ve continue to republish old posts. Over the past week, I republished a bunch of free homemaking printables I had taken down. I’m not done yet, but there are quite a few there at the moment if you are interested. It’s something I can do while listening to videos or podcasts in the background. Keep checking back because I probably have at least another dozen to do.

I wasn’t sure what to do about being back on Facebook and so I didn’t do anything much at first. It’s really weird on there right now compared to other social media platforms I use that are much more active. But I think I’ve found what I’m supposed to do on Facebook so I’ve started posting a little bit each day. I’m still active on Gab and set up a separate Truth Social account for my second website. I’m also using Twitter for news research and frequently repost on there.

I haven’t been posting much on this website. Partially it’s because I’ve been busy posting on my other website and partially because I’m not sure what I want to do here. I’ve had a couple of ideas, but I don’t want to start something unless I’m certain I will follow through. I’ve thought several times about starting up my A Quiet Simple Life podcast again. I only intended to stop for a short time in 2019, but then life took over and I haven’t gotten back to it. The downside is it requires a level of production rather than simply recording something and posting it here on my website.

I thought about simply making voice recordings about different topics (home, faith, homeschooling, etc.) and embedding them here in posts, but I’m not sure. It makes more sense to make videos because I can put them on multiple platforms. That, however, requires a lot more time. With homeschooling high school, time is something I have to use carefully.

So that’s kind of the bottom line around this particular place. I’m not sure what I want to do here so I haven’t done much. And I know I sound like a broken record, but everything is so broken right now online that it makes it impossible to know what’s working, what’s worthwhile, etc. Maybe this is a season of letting things go fallow here for a bit?

I also took on a new responsibly at church this year. I am happy to do it and it’s a good fit for me. But it does add one more thing to my mental list of things to keep up on so that has been a factor as well. It involved a lot of extra meetings in February so that was another thing I’ve been focused on.

So that’s a little bit of our life right now. We’re all doing well and are keeping busy with the different things God has called us to do at this point in time. I hope you and your family are doing well. Please leave a comment and tell me what you’ve been doing during this last part of winter!