My daily journal stopped, because I went to a women's retreat for the weekend, then came back and spent a few days going through a stomach flu and recovering. So now I'm back out of the habit of housecleaning, but would like to start that up again. A friend gave me a loaf of Amish Friendship Bread, and the starter. So I've gotten rid ...

August 15, 2007: Today I finally baked three loaves of Three-Flour Bread, but again it was a little over-baked, and I had put in too much whole wheat flour, so they came out rather hard. They taste pretty good, though. I spent most of the day researching and taking notes on the Hopi annual ceremony cycles. Fascinating. My friend, Hilary, and I ...

August 14, 2007: I spent a little over an hour cleaning again this morning. It was great, but afterwards I felt wiped out (the mopping usually does this). I noticed, though, that since I've started noticing dirt more, I have less tolerance for it, so throughout the day I did small cleaning jobs here and there as well. I should have baked ...

August 12, 2007: Today we ate slices of sourdough toast, but it is so sour-tasting (all that long rising) that we can only stomach it with jelly on top. Some breads just are a flop. I ended up disposing of the loaves, after several attempts at eating it. August 13, 2007: Today I meant to make some better bread, but my energy was low and I just ...

August 11, 2007: This morning the cats woke me at 5:00 am. I slowly awoke over the next hour and was able to jump out of bed with the 6:00 alarm. This, despite having stayed up till midnight again the night before. By 6:30 I has mixing and kneading the sourdough loaf, and I set it to rise. We all had karate this morning, then returned around ...

August 9, 2007: Today I was a little tired from all of yesterday's activities, but not too much. I registered the girls with their schools in the morning and we had karate class. I spent the afternoon sewing with my friend, Kathryn. For supper we had tostadas with lettuce and onion from our garden. Julia likes garden onions--we've noticed ...

August 8, 2007: Today my energy has finally returned! I ran errands in the morning, after I attempted making applesauce for our breakfast pancakes. It tasted delicious, if a little tart, but I really do need a food mill, so the rest is keeping in the fridge until I can get one. There was something wonderful about eating my own applesauce from our ...

August 8, 2007: Today I made Oven-Baked Apple Pancake for breakfast using the cooking apples. Everyone else seemed more interested in cereal and milk, and I ended up enjoying the apple pancake for breakfast, morning snack & lunch! Yummm... I had no energy again today. Still, we ran errands a couple of times and I did laundry. MOst of the day ...

August 6, 2007: Sean and I had stayed up so late after my busy day out with the kids that on Sunday (August 5), I was at-the-end-of-my-rope tired and just rested all afternoon after church. It's been raining hard every afternoon so the gardens are doing well. Today I had to run errands all morning. I felt a little bad about breaking down and ...

August 4, 2007: Today Sean needed me to take the kids out all day so he could concentrate with his work and meet his deadline. So we spent the day at a Santa's North Pole (a small kids theme park) and had a lot of fun and ate junk food. I had started the sourdough bread process and forgot to tend to it as soon as we returned, so I had to stay ...