September 101 update

My latest update on the 101 in 1001 I am attempting to do.  How many days in am I now?  175?  Need to be 17 or 18 complete, then.

1. Celebrate five strange holidays   (cheeseburger day, September 18 2023) 2/5

We 'celebrated' cheeseburger day by eating homemade cheeseburgers.  And fries.  Can't forget fries.

22. Finish cleaning barn office and redoing the awards/putting them up in frames  DONE September 2023

I'm counting this as done.  All the frames are back up on the wall.  There is still work to be done in the office as it is never ending, but the main areas I wished to tackle are complete.  My husband keeps working in there which is  'undoing' some of the progress on the counters by the computer, so that is a never ending process, haha. 

32. Create free to use items in Cricut design space (3/15)

I made a 'Raising Arrows' t'shirt for my husband as his birthday gift and since I created it using all free items on the design space in Cricut, I published it for anyone else to use as well.

37. Try to do a walk for ms or life walk or something similar (DONE September 20, 2023)

We did this in September as we joined the 1 Million March 4 Children in our area against the SOGI curriculum being pushed in schools.  I am disturbed and disgusted by the stuff they are putting in the school libraries and classroom libraries that children have access to.  I'm thankful to be homeschooling, and I'm thankful that there are many schools in the area that haven't fallen to this yet, but oh boy some of the stories I've heard from even our local area disturb me.  

42. Read entire Bible in a year (35/66 books)

I'm currently in Isaiah and 2 Thessalonians.

54. Try 10 new recipes (10/10)  (DONE October 11 2023)

This week I made a cheesy bacon soup.  It was really good!  Took a lot longer to make than I expected, though, haha.  It was on our 'dairy' calendar.  The kids sometimes spot those recipes and beg me to make them.  Also, for my daughter's birthday, I made gluten free and sugar free banana cupcakes and cream cheese frosting.  Yes, no sugar.  I used honey to sweeten a little cream cheese for her (she is avoiding all sugar).

60. Finish basement floor (DONE October8 2023)

I'm so happy to be done this now.  I mean, there is always more I could do, but I am now done the area I set to do.  I had to wait with the one zone near the washer and dryer because I had to put up the shelf in the corner first in order to be able to note where the matts would need to go to.  That's done!

61. Put up shelves for laundry room/table area (WIP)

I got the main shelf that I wanted up now.  It's for the laundry baskets.  So much nicer than before.  Now I need to make the table section and the façade for in front of the laundry sink to make it look nicer.

95. Successfully grow a garden (here and here)  DONE October 2023

Gardening for the year is done.  I didn't grow many things, only tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers.  They all grew.  Tomatoes were all tiny, but I got a lot of them.  Potatoes look good, too.  I just need to pull out all the plants now.  Peppers are only now showing up.  They are about 2 inches across.  I might need to bring the pot inside the workshop so they don't freeze and can continue growing.

20 down, 81 to go!

Another 101 in 1001 update!

It's end of the month yet again!  Time for another 101 in 1001 update.

2. Do the 1000 hours outside challenge (1000 Hours Outside )  396/1000

7. Find 5 interesting places/events to visit in local area (4/5)

My husband took the kids to the local festival for some fun while I spent a couple of hours making pizza sauce from tomatoes in the garden.  They had fun.

16. Make something we want out of stuff laying around/trash rather than buying. (4/5) 

Been working on an item in the backyard.  It is now useable, but not finished.  Used an old bunkbed, placed it on two pallets, put some scrap wood cut to size in where the bottom bunk mattress would be (those were trashed... full of mice), and am cutting a bunch of branches from the trimming I did around the farmyard this summer into sticks to cover the sides to make it like a 'tree fort' of sorts.  Not sure how I'll do the top yet, as I need more wood to cover that so it can be another seat or lookout, but for now it works at the fireside for sitting.

22. Finish cleaning barn office and redoing the awards/putting them up in frames

I aim to work on this during the week yet.  I finished the sitting/kitchen area and got the frames up, but the actual office desk (which we started and got somewhere on earlier in the year) is full of random piles of things again and needs more work than I thought.  Also, since this has 4 zones, I've completed 2 of them now... the kitchen/seating area, and the shower/sink area.  The laundry/storage area needs doing and the actual office zone.  Both were started.  Both had a lot done.  Both have been undone somewhat as they are more 'used' it seems.  I guess I didn't have as much of a maintaining plan in place for those areas.

27. Fix floor properly in bulk tank room

Hoping to work on this sometime this week.

42. Read entire Bible in a year (26/66 books)

I'm just finished Psalms and starting 2 Corinthians.

54. Try 10 new recipes (8/10)

I made a zucchini boat recipe that used cottage cheese.  Recipe can be found here.  It was really good!  My oldest two kept getting more.  We used 4 rather large zucchini a friend gave us and only had half of one left at the end of the meal (we served it with sausage).  It would be a lot quicker if you already had the cottage cheese rather than making it yourself.  

Also, not sure if it should count or not, but I made tomato sauce from my garden tomatoes (since that is it's own item, I won't put it in here).

Today I made a crockpot cabbage soup using all sorts of garden veggies.  It looks and smells delish.  We'll see how it tastes.  Since I had so much cabbage, I made a 'second batch' by prepping all the veggies and spices and putting them into a freezer bag for later.  Recipe can be found here.

Edit to add:  I made two new recipes before Sept 1.  Apple juice (from crab apples the size of cherries.  Just take off the stems, wash, chop in half, boil water and cover for a few minutes before turning off and letting sit for a number of hours with a cinnamon stick and a large scoop of honey mixed in.  The kids love it!  And the chickens love the leftover apple pieces.)  The second recipe was a creamy zucchini sauce.  I got more zucchini we needed to use up, so this is what I did last night for supper.  

93. Make salsa or pizza sauce from scratch. DONE

Spent two hours on this on the 26th.  Whew!  Biggest problem is how tiny my tomatoes are.  They just didn't want to grow to full size and they are starting to ripen already.  I was afraid of them going bad, so I blanched them, peeled them, pureed them, cooked them down and then saw all the little seeds and strained them out.  I'd do that before cooking next time, to be honest.  Added my spices and my 2 lbs of tomatoes (which was probably about 50 of them, it was ridiculous the amount of work that took) became 2 cups of pizza sauce... which promptly went on the pizzas I made for supper that night.  Tasted great!  Too much work for tiny tomatoes, though.  I'd do it again if my tomatoes were larger.  Most of mine were barely bigger than cherry tomatoes!  Here is the site I used for a recipe.

95. Successfully grow a garden 

Been harvesting tomatoes!  The pepper plants have little tiny peppers starting.  I am not getting any cucumbers this year.  My mother in law did a lot of gardens with the kids and yesterday they brought me 30 corn cobs which I made 18 for supper, and the other 12 blanched and froze (1.5 kgs of frozen sweet corn!  Yes!).  Making soup currently using one of the cabbages she had me take from the garden (she has quite a few... I honestly don't know what else to do with cabbage besides soup as my kids don't like cole slaw).  Also used beet leaves, celery, and for the first time in years we have carrots in the garden!  Trying to use up all the giant zucchini she gave me.  That thing is giant!  Half of it was 4 cups chopped (after removing the seeds and the peel).  I still have another quarter of it in my fridge.  Been chopping it up and cooking with eggs and ham and cheese at breakfast lately.  Used half of it today in the cabbage soup... 2 cups for freezing, 2 cups in the crock pot.

15 down, 86 to go!  We are 132 days in.

101 in 1001 Update

So, here we go on what seems to be my monthly update of the 101 in 1001 challenge I am trying to do!  Let's see if I'm getting these done! 

2. Do the 1000 hours outside challenge (1000 Hours Outside )  324/1000

We've been spending a lot of time outside on some days.  A few days we've even had 10 hours out there!  It's fantastic!  I will say, the smoke in the air does pose problems to some of us as we have been getting headaches or in the case of my one daughter, she has breathing issues which are made worse with it.  Hopefully the air quality will improve further.

7. Find 5 interesting places/events to visit in local area (3/5)

We visited the museum for their Canada day festivities on July 1st and then we went to an event a few hours away late July for their thresher men's reunion.  That was fun!  So, that's 2 more 'local' events!

16. Make something we want out of stuff laying around/trash rather than buying. (3/5)

I've been getting frustrated with some of the things in the kitchen lately, and so I finally took some scrap wood from in my workshop and made things out of it!

First, I was getting tired of the metal water bottles falling all over the place and making it difficult to put things away.  They don't stack of their own accord when they are round, haha.  So, I took a short piece of pallet board, drilled holes in it and used a dowel that was once taped together for a tent pole and chopped it up into pieces to hold my bottles in place!  Nice!  So much better!

Then there was the area I had my baking pans.  They didn't fit nicely together anymore as the cupcake tins were thicker and made it more difficult, so I found out that I could put a shelf in!  I found a board that was almost the right width... and then put in (very awkwardly, I might add) some braces to put it on.  It isn't perfect, but it functions as intended!  I'm happy with the outcome!

21. Create bike/walking trails on the farm

I've been going to the back to check out the field to see how this would best work.  It looks like we might work on this at the same time as building the fence.  See below.

23. Build cow fence

My husband and I took a walk through the old pasture area to assess the current situation with the fence.  It looks like we may need to redo the entire thing.  A bunch of wire was ripped out when someone mowed a few years ago, not noticing that it got wrapped around the blade.  Also, the trees have encroached on the fence area and we will need to replace so many of the posts that we figure it might be easiest to move it in by a few feet.  The ground is really bad out there, too.  Not sure, but I wonder if we will need to disc it and try to level it better.  I wonder why the ground is so very bad?  

25. Fix roof on barn

I've had a design in my head for this for awhile now, and even though I was researching it myself to see if I could do some of the work, I really don't see it happening.  It's pricey, but we found someone who drew up plans that follow my vision (he seemed excited by the idea) and so we are hoping to get this finished before the snow flies this year.  It isn't exactly what I was thinking when I wrote it in, as I was thinking of doing the work myself, but I just cannot see myself doing this.

41. Volunteer some time to clean/mow/fix up the old Heritage Cemetery

My husband called up the different groups to see about the old cemetery we found his ancestors in that is located in a field and has had little to no work done in it for years.  He called the owner of the field as well to ask for permission.  Looks like we have the go ahead to do work there.  The last time anything was done was well over 40 years ago, we were told.  He figures it might have been his grandpa, and the marker that was made for his 3 greats grandparents looks like a project his grandpa might have done himself.  We are even looking into a simple headstone to replace the marker that has broken and is practically unreadable anymore.  Thankfully we have a photo of it from 8 years ago when it was still there.  I looked into headstone cleaning as well, and there is a product we can get from a local store that is supposed to be made for the job.

42. Read entire Bible in a year (23/66 books)

Currently reading through Psalms and Romans.  

74. Visit a local museum we haven’t seen before (DONE! July 2023)

We saw two this last month!  This one and this one.

77. Visit a Nordic/Icelandic area (Done July 2023)

We went to another area a few hours away earlier in July that has a heritage museum about the Icelandic people who settled there originally.  Very interesting history!

88. Make a wooden item (birdhouse/deck box/bike shed) with the kids (DONE July 2023)

Z was very insistent on me making a wooden 'toy' that he saw in one of the Childcraft 'how it works' books.  Each chapter is separated by an image of simple structures being 'manned' by little 'robots' made of strange things.  He loved the one with logs.  It looked simple enough to reconstruct, so we did.  I had him learn to use the saw and the hammer.  My 8 year old has been begging to learn to use tools, so she used them as well and helped.  I used the power tools, as I'm just not comfortable with my 5 or 8 year old's using those.  I will likely make more things with my older kids as well later on, but I loved that this thing worked.

Z using the saw.

Bella using the saw.

Time to hammer in some nails!

The finished project.  

94. Hatch our own chickens 

So... we started on this (you can read that here).  We were checking the eggs regularly.  Then one morning my husband went to check on them and they were gone.  All of them.  Not a single egg left in that corner.  Not a remnant of them remaining.  No egg white on the ground to say they smashed.  No chicks.  No shells.  Nobody took the eggs (that we know of).  The only thing we can think of that happened is that the chicks hatched all overnight, and the chickens... um... ate them.  I didn't think that would happen.  The hens were broody and often sat atop the eggs.  The roosters were protective of the hens and didn't like when we wanted to check the eggs with the hens on them.  The hens were laying more eggs in that spot (we had to frequently check them to make sure we took the fresh laid ones out).  The chickens had plenty of food.  They had plenty of water.  They were lacking nothing.  I just never thought this was something that would happen.  It makes me sad.  

The chickens haven't lain a single egg in that spot since.  Not a single one.

100. Take a tour of my local area… bring camera

So, I recently downloaded a game called Pikmin Bloom on my phone.  The interesting thing about it is that they have 'spots' in the game with 'large flowers' you attempt to bloom with your pikmin, and 'mushrooms' you attack with your pikmin that correspond to churches, local points of interest, and interesting historical signs around town.  I went on a walk with the kids on Thursday (as I do when we are done with the library craft classes for three of the kiddos) and found some interesting points of interest using this app!  I didn't even know they existed before now, and I've walked those areas many times before!  Things like a historical well pump, different lot numbers from the original site, plaques telling the story of the man who the walkway/park was named after, all sorts of interesting things!  So I am hoping to 'tour the town' using this app to help me see these interesting points.  They have photos of them when you tap on the flower as well.

So, looks like I completed another 3 items in 25 days!  Yay!  I wonder what August will bring?