Happy Friday! I hope you had a good week. Ours was good overall. The autumn colors have simply exploded this week. We took a drive yesterday and saw so much gorgeous scenery. It is definitely a great year for the trees. This is not always the case so it’s always such a blessing when the color is vivid.

We’ve started our dark-eyed junco watch. They generally leave on April 15 and return on October 15. It can vary by a few days, but I would be surprised if we didn’t see at least a few early scouts this weekend.

We’re all officially recovered from our colds, including Caroline’s ear infection. Hoping and praying we can stay healthy moving forward!

Today’s Artwork

Today I’m featuring another work by Albert Anker. This is The Baptism, an oil on canvas from 1864.

I shared his bio last week in Simple Living This Week No. 102 so I won’t feature it again. I did a quick look back on other times I’ve used his artwork and found:

• Simple Living This Week No. 21
• Simple Living This Week No. 24
• Simple Living This Week No. 34
• Simple Living This Week No. 39
• Simple Living This Week No. 44
• Simple Living This Week No. 71

I think that is all of them. I just did a quick scan of all the posts in this category and those are the ones that jumped out at me for sure.

Homemaking

I am just about done switching out the seasonal clothes. I don’t know why this job takes so long, but it does. I should have all that in hand by tomorrow.

Caroline was gifted some money for clothes and so we went to Lands’ End this week to look specifically for pants as well as anything else that would work. She’s very particular about her clothes (fabric and fit). We hit a goldmine. They had a particular type of pants she has long wanted and they had them in three colors. We bought all three. We also found two pants and sweater combinations that looked very nice on her and will work well for church. I love it when an outing is both productive and makes the buyer very happy. It doesn’t always happen so it’s such a blessing when everything falls into place. Now she just needs some shoes that aren’t tennis shoes.

Homeschooling

We got back into the swing of things. Nothing major to report here. Just thankful that we are all back to health and are getting back to “normal” in this area (whatever that is).

I had some conversations and emails with a few people about how homeschoolers have changed in the past five years or so. I’m curious what you have observed whether you are a “retired” homeschooler or a new homeschooler. Millenials make up a significant portion of the “younger” homeschoolers and people have observed some significant changes. I’m curious what you are seeing or experiencing if you care to leave a comment.

Work

As part of the entire PayPal event that went down last weekend, we spent a few days removing ourselves and our business from PayPal. We have had an account for many, many years. We added Stripe as a credit card processor a year or two ago, but the increasing wokeness in so many of these companies was concerning. For the past year, we’ve seriously looked into other options but the timing was never right.

But PayPal’s $2,500 penalty for exercising our free speech was the last straw. We knew we had to take care of this whether it was convenient or not. I am simply waiting for one last transaction to complete so I can shut it down. I even wrote a little poem for them when they ask the reason why we are closing our account. I’ll share it with you once I’m done.

So we’ve been getting set up with Cornerstone Payment Systems. It is a Christian company that handles accounts for large Christian organizations such as HSLDA. Hopefully by Monday we will have everything switched over. It impacts our business (David and Sallie) and this website. We also had to change so many monthly charges for various business-related things. I’m sure there are things we haven’t thought of like getting paid by companies I’m an affiliate for. I just don’t care. This was and is a huge line in the sand for us as Americans, business owners, and Christians.

There is never an easy time to do this, but it will be a relief to have it done. We had already switched our hosting to a free speech company and the payment processing was really the last vulnerability that we needed to address.

What did you do this week? I hope you’ll leave a comment. I think I finally caught up this week and responded to comments that came in while I was sick. If I missed yours and it needed a reply, please let me know!