January, oh my January

Who looks at January with any fondness?  It begins with a big post-Christmas clean-up and a let-down after the jolliness of the holiday season.  And then there's nothing to do but look forward to months of snow, ice, and frigid weather--the winter doldrums.

But for this housewife, January is a sort of a golden month.

To understand why, take a look at the rest of my year....

February, March--garden planning, seed starting
April, May--spring cleaning, planting, gardening, preparing for the summer market
June, July, August--gardening, farmer's market, vacation/camping, yardwork
September, October--canning, chicken processing, fall garden cleanup
November--craft shows, Thanksgiving preparations, deer processing, housecleaning
December--Christmas (wall to wall)

It seems as though the simpler my lifestyle, the more it is tied to the seasons.  I can buy produce at the store any time of year, but if I want to grow my own, I have to put in the extra work in the summer and fall to preserve it for the rest of the year. 

So January is a month for daily doses of hot chocolate with homemade marshmallows, catching up on my book and magazine reading, and watching movies as I work on all the craft projects I can only dream about as I'm shelling peas or washing sticky peach juice off the kitchen floor. 

So now you see why January is absolutely priceless to many a housewife. 

A quick intro

How does one start a new blog?  It's like trying to decide on the first thing to write in a clean, new notebook.  So, I'll just tell you a little bit about me, which will also serve as a background for all the experiments I like to try and the cool stuff I've stumbled across.

A gadget that makes fruit and veggie chips in the microwave--$26.  I barely even glanced at the picture as I browsed through a catalog for a recent fundraising drive.  I didn't see it as something revolutionary or even interesting, really, just a way to speed up the ancient process of drying produce.  (Y'know, for those days when the craving for zucchini chips hits you hard and fierce....)  It wouldn't have made an impression on me except that two of my friends had been looking through the same catalog and were intrigued and excited about it to the point that they each ordered one. 

At first, I felt a little self-conscious.  Why didn't I see how utterly awesome it was, too?  But truthfully, I'm not often drawn toward new things; overwhelmingly, it's the old that piques my interest.  And I've been that way as long as I can remember.  Even as a child, I was always wondering, "How did they used to (insert activity)?"  I've always been a little dubious of "the latest" of anything and the assumption that it's an improvement over the old.  I think we've lost a lot in our never-ending focus on what we call "progress."

Somewhere along the line I realized that not everyone else looks at life the same way that I do.  It baffles me, but history is endlessly fascinating and and I'll do my best to get you to see it, too.

I guess it's important to have the inventors and the revolutionaries, too.  Otherwise, I'd probably still be wearing fig leaves, but they just don't cut it in my climate.