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ourselves which saves so much money at september 02 2025 1 comment email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest monday september 1 2025 september 1 a new goal to document my daily life mostly for myself but perhaps in some small ways my sharing will inspire others online inspiration radical neighboring what do humans who aren t consumers look like sunflowers in the farmstand granny squares from nutiden yarn i love working with this unspun yarn from sweden oatmeal raisin cookies bagels made of course more went on garden work and mike continues to work on getting a large overhang off our concrete building out back spending keeping track because we are starting a budget as of sept 1 goal 3000 month total spending with 1 000 for food alcohol cleaners 96 48 hannafords 10 00 of that was a bag of organic potatoes and organic onions looking forward to having a productive garden next year we like to buy local produce but we have had a hard time finding produce farmstands around here the belfast coop s produce tends to be super expensive although i do buy as much as possible from there looking forward to our town s little monthly farmers market on friday where i will be a vendor and make purchases from the other vendors warm wishes tonya at september 01 2025 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest sunday july 27 2025 building a barn we brought some of our animals with us to this one acre lot with a bit of the land including a slope down to a brook that isn t usable 6 goats 8 chickens 2 ducks and our guinea hen already on the property was a cinderblock building used to be a chicken incinerator when meat chickens were a huge thing in the is part of maine with a large overhang mike and i drove over to maine a week before closing on the house to make two stalls under the overhang for the goats and also build a simple greenhouse structure for the birds the animals had to wait until our new septic system could be installed before we could work on their permanent housing and fenced in area in the meantime mike added a small bit of fencing on each side of the stalls for the goats before the new barn was finished my sweet goat of 14 1 2 years madeline died sad for sure but she lived a long and healthy life until the end here is the barn that mike built it has three sections two for goats and one for the chickens and is 12 x 12 off the front is a large fenced in area that the small goats chickens and ducks share inside the chicken coop part of the barn the hay feeder in the goats stall next up is to remove the large overhang as it is not attractive and it will let us have a view of the animals fenced in area and provide a bit more open land at july 27 2025 1 comment email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest saturday july 19 2025 living in the moment in a phone conversation with my 75 year old father yesterday morning he commented that he needs to plan his next vacation trip this fall instead of waiting until the spring because he turns 76 in late october and no man in his family has ever lived past the age of 76 i told him that he will be the first and no matter how old we are all each of us has is this very moment later the same day i was face timing with a friend who turns 70 this year and although she has a strong faith and is generally optimistic she admitted it is hard not to think about her shelf time getting shorter myself i will be turning 56 next month and will be closer to 60 than 50 maybe it is hormones maybe it is getting older and these thoughts are normal but i also feel a bit of selfishness creeping in about how i spend my moments last night was date night as it has been for years on date nights we tend to get a little dressed up and pay a little more attention to how we look generally the only night i will put on more than just mascara through the years with young children it would mean getting them fed early and watching a movie while we would enjoy a quiet dinner and then get them to bed and enjoy wine and a movie ourselves now that we live close to a sweet coastal town we have been generally going out hoping to get seats right by the water and have a locally made beer with some live music playing last night was one of the rare nights where the air was even warmer than 12 minutes inland where we live and the sun was shining and the sky a clear blue with a warm breeze blowing truly perfect after we left the wharf restaurant we walked a bit and found some more local music playing at another restaurant outside we were able to stand on the outskirts with the bay behind us and the sun setting on our right side and mike my husband was standing on the curbing elevated behind me massaging my shoulders for those moments everything felt perfect like a slice of heaven at july 19 2025 1 comment email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest sunday july 13 2025 change happens even when you fight it taken on moving day march 31 2025 our family moved from our small farmstead in central vermont back to midcoast maine on march 31 we now live just a 12 minute drive from our daughter son in law and 19 month old grandson and about 20 minutes from where we lived in maine 6 1 2 years ago albeit for only 2 1 2 years this was a very hard move for me i was dearly attached to our home in the rural town of vershire vermont the house was built in 1839 and the property was very beautiful having a stream as the back border an acre of fenced in pasture yard and a perfectly flat meadow that we converted to our market garden oh and the sugarshack this we converted to a farmstand a place to set up food for gatherings and a small private guest room complete with a woodstove we had spent 6 seasons lovingly cultivating the property building a greenhouse improving the soil each season adding perennials and more the even harder part about moving was leaving dear friends never in my adult life had i had such strong friendships these are wonderful authentic people that formed a small community when covid hit and our home was the meeting spot for regular potlucks because our house was along a main room we also had friends stopping by frequently to drop off a plant say hello ask if our daughter might want to join them on an outing these are individuals that i trust love and admire for their strength wisdom courage and thoughtfulness back to our move with the housing market seemingly nearing a peak in central vermont we realized that we could probably sell our house and buy a fixer upper for cash near our daughter in maine as well as pay off our debt and spend 6 months fixing up the house we decided to put the house on the market in february because we wanted to take advantage of having as much nice weather as possible to spend fixing up the house we would buy within 5 days we had an offer on our house for even a bit more than we were asking our next job was to see what we could find in maine this is when the sadness began to really creep in for myself it became clear that to find a house for the price we needed to follow through on our plans the house would not be very nice at all and it may be impossible to find something with land as well and be with a 15 minute drive to two towns for each of our children s needs later i would learn that being just a 12 minute drive to belfast would fill one of my own needs mike and i made 3 trips out a five hour drive each way to maine as soon as our house went under contract in vermont and after our 3rd trip we were very discouraged the next day i noticed that one of the houses we had looked at had been reduced 50 000 this put things in a new perspective and although we had only seen the house for 10 minutes which i at the time had 100 disqualified we put an offer on it we had some slight back and forth but we got the sellers to agree to 150 000 which was our goal so we were going from 3 beautiful acres a house perfect for hosting which is one of my gifts a market garden etc to a very ugly house whose updates were all cheap and from at least the 1980s just 1 acre with some of that being a slope to a brook no suitable barn or fencing although we did make an out building work temporarily for the animals very close to the road yes the traffic is loud and really a house with absolutely no character my mental health suffered a bit in those interim weeks between being under contract and moving every ounce of my body kept hoping it would fall through our buyers asked for yet another inspection for example and i would think to myself maybe this will be it yet each time the buyers still wanted it i would remind myself that god has a plan for all of this and tell myself to practice gratitude and remember all the positive reasons for moving the day of the move was long and hard but we had good friends and family helping us i still remember the raw feeling of that day still mourning over all that we had left as we moved most our items into the garage as they would need to stay there while we fixed up the house every ounce of energy nearly drained as i helped to pull up carpet in the bedrooms so we could at least get mattresses down to sleep on that first night thankfully the bedrooms had carpet that was easily removed with hardwood floors underneath not beautiful by any stretch of the imagination but definitely passable this was in sharp contrast to the very hard job of removing two layers of dirty carpet in the living room with a layer of black glue that had to be scraped i will share more of my own personal challenges as well as accomplishments in the coming posts at july 13 2025 3 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels maine wednesday may 17 2023 a new path i wrote and published what i have cut and pasted below on a new blog i was going to start on november 3 2018 over the years since much has changed yet much remains the same this will be more of the direction that this blog will take as my children are getting older now emily our youngest turns 12 this year we are still on our farm in vermont have one grandson with another on the way and life overall is wonderful but so much happened over the pandemic that has changed me in so many ways and has made me stronger i plan to share my story share my research and share my quest for creating as charles eisenstein says the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible here is what i wrote on november 3 2018 as i sit writing from our living room on this rainy dark november afternoon many thoughts are going through my head it seems that so many people including myself take what the media says at face value and that the media has become so polarized that many of us are simply left wondering what to believe i am starting a blog to post my thoughts and articles i plan to write as i spend time researching areas of interest i am specifically interested in exposing hypocrisy questioning norms and creating thoughtful discussion by asking questions which i am sure i will often not be able to answer at the age of 49 our youngest child of 7 is now 7 years old we still homeschool the three youngest and run our online handwork business and are starting a small farm on our new farm in central vermont over many of the last 20 years our family has often chosen a nonconventional path we have been mostly home based as far as work and school and have not chosen to put the acquisition of status or stuff as a priority during the 2016 presidential primaries bernie sanders woke me up politically i had been only marginally following any type of governmental race in the past my husband and i watched rally after rally while the mainstream media were not covering them we found them on youtube and kept up with his schedule when we learned of the extreme corruption in the democratic party that potentially denied bernie sanders the nomination i became angry and determined to do something with my family and business obligations taking up most of my time i didn t do anything much concrete except reply to some tweets or instagram posts or wrote up some blog posts and social media posts of my own i don t know if i will run for office someday but that is a possibility at this time i just want to share an alternative view that perhaps you might not hear from many other outlets warmly tonya at may 17 2023 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest paul kingsnorth excellent conversation paul kingsnorth why i changed sides in the vaccine wars at may 17 2023 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest thursday october 22 2020 nothing will change after november 3rd ink and pen by sarah nothing will change after november 3rd at october 22 2020 5 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest older posts home subscribe to posts atom over the the last few days over the weekend we worked on our property went for a hike at camden hills gorgeous ocean view and worked on some handwork yesterday a simple knit shawl pattern joining in with ginny this week for the yarn along because knitting and reading are two of my favorite things to do on our way home from two needle mitten pattern joining in with ginny of small things for this week s knit along to share a simple mitten pattern that i have had several requests for our etsy shop handmade from maine search this blog pages home follow me on instagram subscribe to plain and joyful living posts atom posts all comments atom all comments blog archive blog archive september 2025 5 july 2025 3 may 2023 2 october 2020 1 december 2019 2 november 2019 1 october 2019 1 april 2019 1 january 2019 1 july 2018 3 june 2018 1 may 2018 1 april 2018 1 march 2018 2 february 2018 2 january 2018 3 april 2017 1 march 2017 2 august 2016 1 may 2016 2 april 2016 3 october 2015 2 september 2015 10 august 2015 5 july 2015 6 may 2015 3 april 2015 9 march 2015 5 february 2015 7 january 2015 12 december 2014 10 november 2014 9 october 2014 9 september 2014 12 august 2014 8 july 2014 8 june 2014 9 may 2014 10 april 2014 10 march 2014 16 february 2014 14 january 2014 16 december 2013 12 november 2013 15 october 2013 15 september 2013 15 august 2013 18 july 2013 18 june 2013 16 may 2013 15 april 2013 18 march 2013 17 february 2013 16 january 2013 19 december 2012 17 november 2012 17 october 2012 19 september 2012 18 august 2012 22 july 2012 19 june 2012 18 may 2012 17 april 2012 20 march 2012 18 february 2012 20 january 2012 20 december 2011 14 november 2011 18 october 2011 16 september 2011 12 august 2011 15 july 2011 12 june 2011 16 may 2011 19 april 2011 19 march 2011 20 february 2011 15 january 2011 19 december 2010 19 november 2010 22 october 2010 23 september 2010 17 august 2010 18 july 2010 19 june 2010 19 may 2010 17 april 2010 15 march 2010 18 february 2010 16 january 2010 14 december 2009 17 november 2009 18 october 2009 18 september 2009 17 august ...