Welcome to Friday! I hope you had a good week. This has been a week of appointments and tab closing for me. We’ve been doing our yearly physicals the past two weeks so that is done. Caroline is sick again, but the doctor said there doesn’t appear to be another ear infection. Even so, it’s definitely slowed her down again this week.

We’ve had an Eastern Towhee like this one in our backyard the past few days. He seems to like the leaves all over the ground that extend out from the woods.

I think we might have seen one here before, but it was long enough ago that I had to find him online to identify him.

Surprisingly we haven’t seen the black-eyed juncos yet! I am very surprised. Maybe this weekend? I just saw one! I went downstairs to make my coffee while finishing this post and there he was out on the lawn near the feeders. So all is right in our little world now.

This Week’s Artwork

The Studio Mirror is oil on canvas and was painted prior to 1916 by Charles Martin Hardie.

Here is a brief bio of Hardie:

Charles Martin Hardie (1858 – 1916) was a Scottish artist and portrait painter.

Born in East Linton in East Lothian in Scotland, the son of Mary née Martin (1817–1901) and John Hardie (1820–1870), a Master Carpenter, Charles Martin Hardie initially joined the family business working as a carpenter; however, being related by marriage to the artist John Pettie persuaded him to train as an artist at the Trustees’ Academy in Edinburgh. Throughout his career he specialised in portraits of Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott in imaginary historical scenes and in paintings of Scottish country life which frequently have a strong narrative theme. Working in oils and watercolour, Hardie painted portraits, landscapes and genre and historical scenes. He maintained a studio in Picardy Place in Edinburgh.

Hardie was elected an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy (ARSA) in 1886 and a member of the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) in 1895. 

At least eight of his artworks are in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland. 

PayPal Closed

We finally got our PayPal closed. My last transaction was “hung up” for several days. (Okay, sure.) In the end, I got it pushed through and I was able to share my little limerick with them.

Making the choice to close our PayPal account has and will impact quite a few things. We had to change a lot of recurring payments which took time. We had to change a lot of payment systems for our business. I’m sure not having a PayPal account is going to close off other opportunities for me as a blogger and such as you will see below. But if we don’t push back on these encroachments on our freedom, there will be nothing left for our children and grandchildren.

Made By Teachers Store Closed

Because I closed my PayPal account, I had to mothball my Made By Teachers store since they only offer payout via PayPal. I had a pleasant email exchange with them and we ended up moving all my products to draft status. So they are still there if anything changes, but they are not available for purchase. I’m thankful I didn’t invest any more time than I did in that shop. I had added 49 products to the shop which was a fair amount of work, but not even close to everything I have. Hopefully there will be enough other people who ask for a different payment method, but at this point I expect the time and money I invested there is probably lost. I will be happy to be wrong.

Telegram Deleted

I also deleted my Telegram account. I can get into the details more if anyone is interested, but Gregg Phillips suggested on Truth Social one evening this week out of the blue that people delete the Telegram app for security reasons he currently could not explain. Lots of discussion ensued. Some people deleted and some didn’t.

In the end, I opted to delete it. I really like the app for so many reasons. But given what we know about how TikTok is being used by the CCP to track people and everything they type (even when not in the app), I decided if Gregg thought Telegram was a similar security risk (my reading between the lines and not his words), I would prefer to just get rid of it. So I finally deleted it last night with a little bit of sadness, but not much doubt.

Simplify

So I’ve simplified my life quite a bit this week. Three less platforms to deal with which is not all bad. It’s three less things to think about and I’ve already found replacements or work arounds for most of it. There is always another way.

Adapt, survive, and advance. That is the name of the game right now, people. It really is. You have to be constantly willing to adapt if you want to maintain your freedom.

Homemaking

I didn’t do anything special this week in the homemaking realm. There wasn’t any time for extra projects.

However, I did notice something interesting. Has anyone else found silica packs in clothes they have purchased? We ordered a couple of things from Lands End and a few of them came with silica packs in them in the plastic packaging. Do you know why? Apparently during the shipping issues the past few years, a lot of clothing molded and/or got mildew while on the ships. They weren’t packed to spend months on a ship and were ruined. I’m guessing some companies got smart and started this new way of doing things. Interesting.

By the way, I save all of those little packets. I have a container we pop them into whenever we get them.

Homeschooling

Homeschooling was a slow process this week. Caroline was finally feeling better and getting back to normal when she said she was getting a new sore throat. It was rather quiet around here for a few days since she couldn’t talk much. She’s getting better, but all of the sickness and doctors appointments and such has really messed with our homeschooling rhythm.

Last night I came up with a different way of describing our homeschooling method. I’m going to write a post about this, but for several weeks I’ve been discussing this topic with a few people. Describing what we do as Relaxed Homeschooling when writing about it on my website wasn’t working for a variety of reasons, primarily because the homeschooling world has changed so much. That term was once widely used. It isn’t now.

I realized that there is another way to describe what we do that is also much more easily understandable, especially for Christians. It is Discipleship Homeschooling.

I will write a post about this but I wanted to mark it here in this weekly post. (We also bought the domain last night so I have control of it. I don’t have any plans for a separate website at this point, but I didn’t want someone else grabbing it either since we never know how life will unfold.)

Work

I wrote several regular posts this week including:

• 5 Reasons To Use A Physical Bible Every Day
• Misdiagnosing Gifted/2e Children
• Out Of The Archives Today (contains links to several posts)
• Morning Hope – Psalm 18:16-50

What did you do this week? I hope you’ll leave a comment and share!