Just Random Thoughts

I am interested in SO many things.  It's really hard to list them all.  I think constantly and really consider sleeping a total waste of my time.  I am an insomniac by nature and thus find a million things to do or try or thing about.  I am slowly learning to do a million things and I will probably get around to some of those.  I have been doing genealogy for about 41 years believe it or not.  I started as a kid sitting at the kitchen table with my mom helping me to do a pedigree chart.  The obsession never really left.  I have made my own laundry detergent which works pretty good.  I have made my own dishwasher soap and have helped my daughter make her own liquid laundry detergent.  My new obsession lately has been learning to grow my own food.  The first year (this last spring) the grasshoppers ate all my peas and beans and what they didn't get, the aphids did.  So I am trying to learn to grow my own food without using any pesticides only natural repellants.  I figured out I could put a mixture of dish soap on the aphids and they don't like that.  I refurbished a lamp and recovered the shade which was a total success.  I also refurbished an old kitchen cart this year.  I did some glass etching.  I made an alcohol stove out of coke cans that worked.  I can hunt and fish and have done so to feed my family.  I don't know if there will be a total shutdown of society as we know it, but if it happens I am totally okay with hitting the woods and living out there for an extended period of time.  I can probably survive, not in luxury, but enough that I don't die of starvation.  I started a book, trashed it, started another one, trashed it too.  I can crochet a blanket but I don't know how to knit yet.  I am going to learn to weave this winter on a small scale loom and hopefully one day I will have a large one.  I want to learn to do all of the things my great-grandmother knew how to do but were lost because we "got citified".  I honestly believe my great-grandmother knew how to take care of herself if she had money or not.  It was the depression after all.  And we have forgotten all those important skills, like making quilts, canning, making soap, making candles, churning butter, etc. etc. in our determination not to have to live like that ever again.  We lost the ability to survive.  Now if it doesn't come from Wal-Mart or any other store, we would absolutely die.  How about raising chickens?  Well I have done it, but most people haven't and don't have a clue.  I have raised hogs, chickens, rabbits, and turkeys.  It's not fun, but there is a good feeling about raising and providing your own food.  I have made jelly, not too well but I made it.  I am not a half bad cook and like to try new recipes constantly especially if it makes a bunch.  So you see, I do have a lot of thoughts rambling in my brain...and I try to find outlets for most of it.  I have a great job which affords me a salary and some time to play with things I want to do.  I am not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination so I try to pick what I want to learn to do by whether it is going to cost more to do the project than I need to spend.  I used to embroider, my eyes are getting bad but I found out they have things called reading glasses that help with that, so I may get back to that this winter as well.  I kind of have this philosophy that we are only here on Earth a small finite time, and I am trying hard to squeeze every single drop learning to do new things and learning ways to improve my life or learn to take care of myself "just in case".  So I will probably post new things I have learned on here from time to time.  This is my brain, all the time...constantly random and full of ideas.