It's been awhile.

While I was in The JoAnn Fabrics store this afternoon purchasing pre-punched paper for my 2024 garden journal, I said to myself, "Self, you should start blogging again. Start with your garden stuff so you will not only have a paper journal for receipts and seed packets, but you will also have an electronic journal of 2024 you - gardening and doing life."

It was such an encouraging conversation with myself that here I am. Back blogging. Yeah me. Yeah you for reading my back-to-blogging post. 

So much has happened since my last post (which was 1,008 days ago)... The hardest has been that my lovely Mom went home to Heaven. I didn't realize how frequently we would chit-chat, text, private message each other, send ridiculous Pinterest pins... I honestly didn't realize until I all the sudden could no longer do those things. 'Tis true the whole "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." <-- Isn't that some sort of 1980's ballad? Probably by Chicago. 

I've become a crazy plant lady. I went from a curly spider plant, a jade plant, and a philodendron to now having many more. And by many - I mean A LOT ALOT! 

In the last 2-ish years, I've gone from dabbling in gardening to setting up a shelving unit in my kitchen, borrowing my friend's grow light & heat mat. I went from cherry tomatoes and catnip to growing peppers, broccoli (which I did not listen to my mom and planted it too late last summer which caused beautiful plants without the vegetable!), calendula, green beans, peas, and zinnias. This year I'm going to go all in by attempting to grow all my salad veggies. I have the aforementioned grow light, shelving unit, and heat mat currently in the middle of my kitchen. The seeds were planted yesterday (01/27/2024). I'm waiting on another order of seeds - mostly veggies with a handful of flower packets and some herbs. 

Speaking of herbs - I'm going to try to grow dill because I want to try making my own pickles as my favorite pickles from Canada have gone up in price in Joe Biden's America to $12.00. YES - TWELVE DOLLARS!!!!! I've never grown dill and I've never made pickles so more on that in the months to come. 

I've also never had thyme plants...as last summer a chipmunk helped himself to my tiny baby thyme. Thyme is planted and I'm just waiting to see the baby plants emerge from the soil. 

Let's see what else...

Through Compassion International, I'm pen pals with a sweet girl in Bolivia. Her name is Mari. She is 10 and loves to craft. She sends notes with a drawing about what is going on in her world. This summer my church is taking a trip there to visit the church plant; unfortunately I'm unable to go on this trip...however it is on my list of places to possibly visit in 2025. 

I'm flabbergasted that today is the last Sunday in January. The days were long and kind of sad as we celebrated my mom's first birthday in Heaven. I'm often unable to articulate how my heart misses her. The grief, the sadness, the loss, just hits me out of nowhere and I'm unable to stop the tears. Her birthday was one of those days. 

We are currently going through the book of Romans - verse by verse at church. I must say I'm loving this study! We wrapped up chapter one today. 

My friend asked me if I wanted to go out to brunch this morning after church. Ummmm...is my hair naturally curly? Of course, I want to have brunch and discuss ALL THE THINGS!!!

February is next. The Groundhog will make his appearance on Friday and say there will be 6 more weeks of winter. Who does that rodent think he is fooling? It's the Midwest. It's winter. 

I suppose this is enough for now. I'm going to go plant my chive seeds. 

Happy Sunday!