From My Home to Yours: 1/9/26

 From My Home to Yours

1/9/26

~ Settling in to 2026! ~

This week has been about tweaking old routines to make them more user friendly, if you know what I mean!  I haven't set any 'new' goals for 2026 and don't really plan to, but I am all about tweaking the old ones for this year.

Regular exercise has been part of my daily routine for several years now, but alas it was not uncommon to find me squeezing it in at the last minute in the evenings.  My 'tweak' for 2026 is to make it a priority to have it done by noon of each day.  I know this won't always be possible, but I'm going to make it a reality as often as I can.  

Another old routine that I'm tweaking and trying to improve upon in 2026 is having a place for everything and keeping everything in it's place.  The goal is not to let things pile up, but to deal with it on a daily/weekly basis.  It's real easy to lay something down with the full intention of putting it where it belongs, only to get distracted ... and well, you know how that goes!  Please tell me that I'm not the only one that has good intentions in this area that somehow manage to go astray!

Let's move on and take a look at what our week looked like ... 

I make my own kefir milk that I use in my daily smoothie and this week I needed to start a new batch.  I leave it out of the refrigerator for about 12 hours and then set it back in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks.  I do nothing to it, in fact, I guess you could say I just ignore it and after a couple of weeks, it makes the creamiest, probiotic filled kefir milk that has helped me with gut issues in a way that I would never have imagined.

I jumped back into my BIG decluttering and deep cleaning our home project that I began in the fall.  I hit the pause button from Thanksgiving to the new year and this week I 'unpaused' the 'go' button and am back at it!  I'm doing this in small steps meaning, I decide what area I want to tackle for the day depending on what I have going on, and work at it until I finish.  I try to keep the 'jobs' small enough that I can have everything back in place, cleaned and organized by mid-afternoon.  This also keeps me from wearing myself out leaving me with no energy for my regular daily homemaking tasks.  This method takes longer, but it works for me.

Let's talk about how we did on our continued goal of paying extra on our new to us vehicle this week ...

to start with, it was a low-spend week where we only spent monies for the things we had budgeted for ...

and drum roll please .... when I closed out the financial month of December, we had paid enough extra on the principal to knock out another payment!  That meant for the month of December, we actually made two payments ... Hoot!  Hoot!  We're going to try to do the same in January.

I've been looking forward to a monthly sew-a-long with a quilter online who has her own business, she does 2 every year and the release of the first one was yesterday ... a mug rug each month.  I really like this idea of doing one per month.  I knew I could come up with enough fabric to complete each month's mug rug and planned on participating ... until I realized you had to purchase the pattern for each month.  The pattern is not expensive and financially I could do it out of my personal money, but I don't want to commit a portion of my personal spending money each month for the rest of the year ... does that make sense?  I'm certainly not going to take it out of our family budget ... every penny of that money has a name on it and any surplus goes to paying off our vehicle.  

Sometimes when we're 'super sonic serious' about reaching our financial goals, the answer is going to be a resounding 'no' for things we want.  This week my 'resounding' 'no' was to the monthly mug rug patterns.  I really like this lady's designing style and have purchased patterns from her in the past, but that was before ... and now this is after.  I wish her great success, those mug rugs are so cute ... but, I feel really, really good about my choice not to spend the money too!

I've been busy this week but nothing completed to show for it.  I cut out and prepped two zippered project bags and started turning two dresses into two skirts, but ... they're not completed.

I fell behind on keeping my laundry done in a timely manner and had a big laundry day this week.  While I was at it, as if the amount I had wasn't enough, I took down the living room curtains and the bedroom curtains and washed, dried and rehung them.  Of course, you know that while the curtains were being washed, I worked on the windows as well.  (Our temperatures are in the upper 60's to upper 70's this week, perfect for deep cleaning.)

Once the curtains were rehung in the living room, I placed my mama's diaper pen back in the curtain.  (There is no telling how old that diaper pin is!) For as long as I can remember, my mama would stick a pen in an out of the way place of a curtain.  I asked her one day before she passed why she did that and her answer was so simple that it made me smile.  It makes me smile even more now!  She said, 'so I'll know where to find one when I need it!'

My mama was from a different era, she was the child of parents (the baby in fact) who weathered the Great Depression and who also had a large family as well. That meant she learned first hand how to make do ... and that included learning that diaper pins had more than one use!

I finished reading book one in the Bregdan Chronicles I mentioned last week and have started book two.  I have to choose my time wisely for reading as once I get started I don't want to quit!!

That's it for this week, I hope you've found something in my ramblings that will help and or encourage you in the upcoming week.

Until the next time ...

mrs. patsi @ A Working Pantry

~ quietly holding the home front ~

She looketh well to the ways of her household … Proverbs 31:27 

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