{2022} week 28 – Books, Habits, and Potatoes

How was your week this week? We’re getting hot and dry in Oregon after a long, cold spring, so things in the garden are perking up and needing a lot more water.

Garden

A friend dropped in earlier this week and we ended up in the garden. Some of my potato plants were looking about done, so we dug in and did a “potato reveal.” Did you even know that was a thing on YouTube?!

Unfortunately my reveal was less than exciting because I didn’t realize how ROCK HARD the soil was in that lower bed. I was so scared after poisoning my garden last year, that I haven’t amended it with anything and the soil compacted to something close to concrete. But, we still dug up some small potatoes and got about 7 pounds (we air fried some and ate them to celebrate).

And check out that cool spring scale I got from Amazon. One of my goals this year is to grow 500lbs of our own produce. So far we are up to approximately 18.25 lbs. The tomatoes have finally perked up, and I have a few savoy cabbages that didn’t go to seed, plus two more beds of potatoes, one of sweet potatoes, corn, peppers, carrots, garlic, and tons of beans still to grow, harvest, and weigh. Should be fun!

After all that, I top dressed that concrete bed with about 4 inches of homemade compost and planted 8 more potatoes that had sprouted. I think there should be time for them to fully grow and produce before our first frost. Doesn’t that soil look rich and beautiful? It’s so amazing you can throw scraps and plants and leaves into a barrel and let it sit and out comes soft, fluffy, rich soil that you get to grow in. Gardening continually amazes me at how perfectly God designed our world. From death comes life.

Patience Project

My patience project has turned from a daily bucket of weeds, to working on repainting and deep cleaning our spare room (used to be our son’s room). I have been painting, culling, and donating things and am fighting the urge to drop everything else I should be doing to work on that all day. But, patience. By next week I hope to have it done by plugging away on it little by little.

By the way, when working on a painting project like this, I never clean my brushes and rollers when I’m done that day, I store them all sealed up tightly in plastic bags, even the paint roller tray. I’ve done it this way for years and sometimes I’ve even left them for weeks in their bags and never had any problem with things hardening up.

Another side to my patience project is to keep working on daily habits and not getting distracted or blow them off. Out of 60 possible checkmarks on my habit tracker this week I completed 23. That’s 38%. I didn’t realize I was going to blog this, so that’s kind of embarrassing, but that’s the reality. Let’s see how next week goes. What habits are you guys working on?

P.S. RMM means Renew My Mind. I’m using Barb Raveling’s Freedom from Procrastination study to do that. In it she has a Bible study, plus a section in the back with questions to answer when you’re procrastinating along with Bible verses. If I would have done that part better, maybe I would have been better at the others. Next week I’ll put that habit at the top of my tracker.

Continuing Education

A couple weeks ago I posted about continuing my education and I’m off plugging along with the classical education plan outlined in The Well Educated Mind. I am trying to get through the first novel listed, Don Quixote (clocking in at a massive 940 pages) by the end of July. I’m a little behind my schedule but hope I can get caught up this week.

Cervantes was an excellent writer, but his main character, Don Quixote -self proclaimed Knight Errant- is not an excellent knight, which makes the novel pretty funny. As a result, the guy gets beaten and broken and bruised all. the. time. So I decided to keep a record of all of his injuries in the back of the book. So far, this is how he looks:

As of Saturday I’m on page 341 of 433 (which is my reading goal for this week. I need to read 92 pages today and tomorrow. hmmm.) The novel just wrapped up a side story with a happy ending of some side characters and introduced two new characters that seem like they’ll be the next side story that our “Knight of the Sorrowful Face” will make a mess of.

Books

Current status of books that I’ve started but not finished. I wish I was way more organized and disciplined when it comes to everything, especially reading, but…

Book I’m actively working on that takes most of my time:
Don Quixote

Books I’m trying to read in little snatches of time here and there (instead of screens):
The Courage to be Protestant (recommended by a friend)
Biography of James Hudson Taylor (recommended by Martyn Lloyd-Jones)
Expository Apologetics (Excellent book on how to share truth well, almost done!)

Book on my nightstand:
All Creatures Great and Small Heard about on a podcast + on sale on Amazon! Depending on what time I get to bed, I can read anywhere from one sentence to a chapter.

What are you reading? Do you have a good system that works for you to not have a bunch of partially read books?