Weekly Ramble – February 8, 2025

Hello, Hi, How are you? It’s been a couple weeks, so let’s catch up, shall we? On the docket today: new seasons, seeking wisdom, and a new project.

January was a squishy month for us, recovering and debriefing from the holidays, gearing up for Disneyland, and then a slow slide into the spring semester and all that entails.

Turns out the last two weeks have been less of a slow slide and more like a 5-car pile up at a stoplight. I really wasn’t prepared for re-entry!

A New Season

We’ve got three kids at the state university with all new schedules. This is generally not a problem, but the more people, the more complex the transportation issues. This house is much farther from the train station than our last house, so there’s more juggling.

Additionally, we’ve decided that we don’t feel comfortable with our girls taking the train alone. Thankfully, big brothers have adjusted their schedules to be chaperone and/or chauffeur.

It takes a village, and I’m glad we’ve got one.

Additionally, FishChick16 started her first community college course, something we’ve done to prepare homeschool kids for college. The way her other classes are scheduled, it’s a pretty tight MW schedule where I drive her to campus, she does an online class via the campus wifi, goes to her college class, we eat a quick lunch, then she does another online class.

I work away at my little laptop, but it’s an adjustment to work remotely from home two days a week, especially when there are other afterschool activities to chauffeur. I’ve had seasons like this before, I just wasn’t prepared mentally.

Or meal plannerly….

It’s taking me awhile to figure out how to readjust my Weekly Time Budget to fit in all the things, including meal prep. It feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day, but I know I just need to pivot how I’m doing things.

Part of that is making more food to freeze so that we have quick lunches and dinners. I’ve dug out my Food Saver to help with that.

Honestly, we haven’t had a busy season like this since instituting a weekly Sabbath/Rest Day, so I’m being challenged to trust God that I really do have time to do the things that need doing. It’s all about getting wisdom to know what those things are.

Seeking Wisdom

I was reading in Proverbs yesterday and this verse jumped out at me:

I, wisdom, dwell with prudence, and I find knowledge and discretion…. I love those who love me, and those who seek me diligently find me.

Proverbs 8:12, 17 ESV

I am desperately seeking wisdom, prudence, knowledge, and discretion!

I know a lot of this is going to boil down to better time management. I have had seasons where I get laser-focused on something to the detriment of relationships. I don’t want to do that, but I also have to get stuff done.

I know people probably think that once your kids are adults, there’s nothing to do, but I feel like there’s more to do than there once was. Anyone else feel like that?

That said, people are more important than productivity. I don’t know about life-work balance, but I think it’s about priorities, maybe? I’m trying to make sure mine are ordered properly.

There’s so much good when that happens. A few years ago I had mine seriously out of whack and honestly, it was an unkindness to my husband. I’m so thankful he was brave enough to tell me so that I could do better.

We just celebrated his 62th birthday which is exactly 31 years from when we got engaged. How are we this old?!

This week we reviewed our financial goals. We both finished listening to the audio version of The Psychology of Money and found it to be very beneficial as well as motivating to save more.

We’ve almost got our savings bucket for Japan filled, then we’ll work on increasing our emergency fund. Since our monthly expenses have increased, it makes our emergency fund smaller, you know?

Bryan continues to surprise me with his wisdom and his kindness. Recently, I told him about my new project, wondering if he would think I was wasting my time — because I wonder if I’m wasting my time.

Instead he was over the moon excited and encouraging. I hope I can be that for my people. It feels so good.

The New Project

I’m writing a novel.

Yep, true story. I’ve always wanted to, and this week I started. I don’t really know what I’m doing and I’m trying to keep my expectations low, considering my qualifications which are few and minor:

• I was a literature major in college, albeit French literature.
• I taught high school English.
• As one cookbook editor said, “I certainly can share my delight in your writing ability. A lot of talented cooks with great flavor sensibilities have a lot more trouble stringing together coherent instructions and engaging text than they do developing recipes, which makes for a far more difficult edit overall. No worries on that score here.” I hold these words very dear. Thank you, Valerie Cimino.
• I’ve read a lot.

I’d been playing with the novel idea for several weeks and had bounced some scenarios off my kids. I even dreamt about the characters one night.

When I sat down to write earlier this week I was pleasantly surprised how the words flowed out. It didn’t hurt that I’ve been binging fiction lately. I’m really curious to see where this goes!

Books Read this Year

Speaking of books, here’s what I’ve read so far this year…

I still need to update my To Be Read 2025 post with a few more details. And, yes, I’ve already exceeded my limit of fun books for the year. We’ll chalk it up to research for my novel idea.

I will get back on the nonfiction train soon, I promise.

Okay, that’s it for me this week. Have a good one!