Meal Planning Basics

I meal plan every Monday. This is one of my most essential chores. It helps reduce my stress level, simplifies grocery shopping, and saves me time and money. It’s a skill I’ve had to learn, but it’s been well worth the effort. What is a meal plan? A meal plan is just a plan of

Energy Management

My energy levels have been lower than usual, so I haven’t been able to get as much done as I usually can. I’m used to being the sort of person that tries to do everything and be everything, so I’ve been finding my current limitations a bit challenging. I wanted to share some of what

Italian Casserole

My family has been having Italian Casserole for so long that I don’t remember how it came about. I was told later in life that it was my Dad’s way of making a sort of “lazy lasagna.” Lasagna was one of the few foods all of his kids liked, but he found making it a

My Thoughts on Self-Care

My blog posts are usually advice-driven, but today I’m more just thinking out loud than anything else. I’ve also had a lot more thoughts about self-care since I started writing this, but I haven’t quite formed all of them into words yet. I rather suspect my opinion will change over time, but I don’t want

Dating on a Budget

I like to be thrifty, but there are limits to how thrifty one can really reasonably be. It’s often a balancing act to take care of the present need while still saving for the future ones. While my thriftiness limits my spending, I do try to put some money into going on dates with my

Artistic Hoarding

Not all “hoarding” is the same. I am putting hoarding in quotation marks here because when I say hoarding in this post I am not referring to an actual hoarding disorder. Hoarding disorder is a real thing that should be taken seriously. In this case I am just referring to the normal tendency people have to

Hobbies and Homemaking

Introduction I have a lot of hobbies. I’ve been finding that some of my hobbies that don’t at first glance seem homemaker-y affect how I homemake and how I go about it. “Homemaking” is honestly a kind of complicated concept. There’s a major part of it that is a mixture of child care, cooking and

Building a Cleaning Routine

What is a cleaning routine? A cleaning routine refers to any system of scheduling cleaning tasks to keeping a home clean and/or organized. The idea is that if you set cleaning tasks to specific times in a predictable, orderly way it stops the work from piling up too much and becoming unmanageable. Depending on the

Moving to Missouri

Following my graduation from university, I moved from Idaho, to Missouri. Moving has been a lot harder on me emotionally than I expected, even though I expected it to be hard. Even if you are excited about a move, you may miss the way things were, be frustrated by the new place, and be stressed

The Home of Artists

My last blog post mentioned that there were two major family traits that have influenced how I view home management. One of them was my family’s lack of health, which was the primary topic of that post. The other one was that my family are artists, which will be the topic of this post. Artists