Welcome to Friday! On this Veterans’ Day, thank you to all who served. David’s father and my father both served in the Navy and we recognize their contributions specifically.

Our family made it through an entire week without Caroline coming down with a new cold. Now I am starting one and I know I picked it up standing in line to vote. Ugh.

This Week’s Artwork

Today I’m featuring another painting by Edmund Blair Leighton. This is The Wedding Register. You’ve probably seen it used many times in books, blogs, websites, etc.

You can read a short biography for Leighton in Simple Living This Week No. 106. I also included a list of all his other works I’ve used for my weekly posts.

Homemaking

My brother brought Caroline 35 quarts of pickles. She loves pickles and his family had canned way too many of them. (David likes them, too, but Caroline is the pickle lover. Alas, I can no longer eat them.) So I can cross pickles off my shopping list for at least a few weeks. LOL!

I’ve continued to do more weeding out and adding to the Goodwill boxes.

I did a bunch of mending this week that had been piling up for weeks and weeks. I mended while catching up with podcasts and CensorTubers I had fallen behind on. It felt very good to get that done and the pile gone. THE NEXT DAY Caroline and David both had something that needed mending. (Insert face palm here.) I haven’t done that mending yet. LOL!

This weekend I need to start thinking about Thanksgiving planning. I cook a roasted chicken meal that all three of us can eat and then I make several other things for David and Caroline that I can no longer eat. Caroline’s favorites are the Midwest Sausage Stuffing and Easy Cranberry Sauce With Orange Juice so I need to make sure I have the ingredients for those!

Speaking of Thanksgiving, all of my Thanksgiving posts and printables can be found here:

• Thanksgiving Celebrations
• Thanksgiving-Themed Activities & Books
• Shop – Thanksgiving Printables & Activities
• Shop – Pilgrims Printables & Activities

Homeschooling

I’m still using Joplin for my record keeping and I’m fairly certain this will be the app I use for the duration of Caroline’s homeschooling. It is working very well for my purposes. Joplin is definitely not as fancy as Evernote, but it does what I need it to do. Plus it is free!

Eventually I will share how I’ve tracked Caroline’s high school classes, but I’m not at that point yet. I’m making it up as I go because there really isn’t anyone else doing what I’m doing (that I’ve been able to find online). Most people are either very schoolish in their high school approach with classes and credits carefully planned OR they are unschoolers and don’t share much of their documentation (whatever they choose to document). I’m sure many other homeschoolers have done things in a similar way to what I’m doing, but nobody has written about it that I can find.

Caroline and I spent some time talking about quirks, abilities, strengths, weaknesses, etc. Just a reminder to the fellow gifted/2e moms out there to make sure you remind your child of the truth you’ve talked about in the past. Caroline brought up a number of things we’ve discussed in the past, but she didn’t remember. Her gifted/2e testing was five years ago and even though we’ve discussed various aspects of her unique combination over the years, it doesn’t mean she remembers. I mentioned a few weeks ago I had gone back and looked over what I had learned to see what I still needed to consider as I was planning. Some things change, but some don’t.

Work

A woman on Gab shared a link to this website: TinyWow. I wanted to share it as well since some of you might find it helpful. (I’m not connected to the site and neither is she.)

The same woman mentioned that she uses Vivaldi for her browser because of the tabs management feature. I have considered switching from Brave to Vivaldi a few times for that exact reason, but haven’t yet. Brave’s privacy is a little better than Vivaldi which is what keeps me there. But maybe some day I’ll go wild and switch to Vivaldi. LOL! I mention it in case it might help someone else.

Last weekend someone shared my What Was In The Envelopes At President Bush’s Funeral?
post on Reddit. I had 15,000 page views in one day. LOL! It was shared in a conspiracy discussion. It was fun to see my numbers go up that day, but it doesn’t really do much for my website long-term. It was a reminder of how back in the day traffic could get a bump when people shared something on social media or Pinterest. People don’t share the way they used to and social media platforms don’t let things go viral in the same way. This is especially true of taking a link will make you leave their site or app. Everything is way too controlled and manipulated. But it was fun while it lasted!

I did open a Twitter account. I don’t plan on using it much, but it has been helpful this week with doing research for my podcasts.

I wrote a few posts. I wrote the last of the Michigan-related election posts, but those have all been moved to draft as they don’t add much value moving forward. In addition, I wrote:

• “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty” – An Extensive Collection Of Reactions To The Emily Oster Article
• Morning Hope – Proverbs 8

No wonder I’m tired this Friday afternoon. It’s been a full week.

What did you do this week around your home? I hope you’ll share in a comment!