I started this website because family and friends told me it would be the best way to tell people about the soaps that I make, but when I started blogging I’ll admit that I never thought about the other end, the potential readers.

When I write a blog post I  want it to be useful to the reader in some way, informational, educational, entertaining and/or even inspirational. One challenge to this is not knowing the audience. Readers can be male or female, young or old, come from any walk of life, and as I have been seeing lately from any part of the world. In just the past month I have had visitors from the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Germany, and New Zealand. I welcome you all.

I am just now figuring out that this blog can perhaps be more useful to the readers if I categorize my posts, so I am going back through the old posts and adding the categories.  Readers can then click on a specific category to find all of the posts pertaining to that subject. This may take a while but is doubtless a good cold-weather project.

I would love to hear from more readers. If you have suggestions, questions, comments, or even just want to say “Hi” please post them in the comments section on this page, as I am not on Facebook and do not see any comments posted there.

Other things on my to-do list include: 1)Finishing a crochet project that I have started. 2)Dehydrating garlic. 3)Making more soap. 4)Working with my husband to plan this years garden. 5) When the weather and ground conditions are suitable helping my husband hang 600 feet of fence around the garden. So expect to see posts about these things in the future. 🙂

I usually don’t make New Years resolution’s because I’ve never had much success at changing something simply because it is a new year. As we turn the calendar to 2016, I hope you will join me in this simple resolution: Live, Laugh and Love.

Live life with a purpose, making good decisions that will help you reach your goals.

Laugh loudly and laugh often. Laughing is good for your health. http://www.helpguide.org/articles/emotional-health/laughter-is-the-best-medicine.htm

Love deeply. Love those that you are close to, that’s a no brainer, but you can also show love to those you don’t know by doing simple, random acts of kindness. It will bring you joy.

Have A Happy 2016!

A funny thing happened to me this morning. As I plugged in our Christmas Tree I heard a loud noise. It stunned me for just a fraction of a second, until I realized that at the precise time that the tree lights came on, my husband, who was in the other room, turned on the vacuum cleaner. It couldn’t have been more perfect if we had choreographed and rehearsed it.

Probably the most common thing people do with pumpkins is make jack-o-lanterns, and we are no exception. Our Halloween celebrations have changed over the years, from going to the orchard to pick pumpkins out of the field, and dressing the kids in the costumes of their choice for trick-or-treat, and passing out candy to a hundred+ kids in our community, sometimes even in costume ourselves, and one time even making a haunted deck; to the kids now being grown and moved away. There are very few trick-or-treaters in our community now, so we don’t buy several big bags of candy to pass out, and we didn’t make the expensive journey to the pumpkin field at the orchard. We did however carve jack-o-lanterns.

Our pumpkin field produced a few nice jack-o-lantern pumpkins this year so we selected a couple that we wanted to save the seeds from. Last night my husband and I carved our pumpkins.

My husband set things up in the living room. Set up also included a fire burning in the fireplace, a Carpenters CD playing, and he with a whisky and water and me with a limon’ and coke. I do believe this is the first time we ever carved pumpkins in the living room – my how things change when the kids are grown.

Scout got curious and decided to join us. Trooper decided to stay elsewhere, as he does not like the cracking sounds the fire makes.

My husband decided Scout should have some treats.

The trick was how fast Scout could eat them.

I thought our jack-o-lanterns turned out cute. Mine of course was the female looking one, while his was the masculine one. We didn’t plan it, but I though it was cool the way they appear to be looking at each other.

We decided that they should have a toast.

Then we turned off the lights and let them do their thing.

A fun night it was. They are lighting the living room again this evening and will probably remain there until Halloween.