Living Like the Past

Hello everyone, Charles and I want to wish you all a Happy New Year!Here we are about to jump out of 2021 and jump into 1943. This is New Years Eve evening at our house and we will hold each others hands and jump together to make sure we don't fall.If you don't know we are starting a History project living like 1943. Yes we have been here before but now we know much more about it and are excited to begin and share what we have learned and we hope many of you will join us.If you do not want to do the study, there is much to learn just reading along and I hope you will enjoy the way we are going to do this.We have been making changes, we are changing back to enamelware, metal ......

If you have happened upon my blog, we are about to start an new History project living like 1943 for a year and I am posting each day information about this project for those that are doing this study with us. This post is information that explains the history study of what would have been going on the latter part of 1942 and then entering 1943. I will get back to normal posting after we get started but I am sharing this information for all of those interested in doing this study with us this year or enjoy following along. There is still much to learn even if you are not actually doing the study. Charles and I had so much to learn about 1943 that we ......

We will need Ration book two when we start our year of 1943. We signed up for this book two in December 1942 but we have not been issued the book at this time. You can make it now or you have time because we will not be using it in January but we will be studying it.The stamps will look different in book two. In the book there are 8 pages of stamps that have letters and numbers and colors blue and red. It looks complicated but only because we haven't started using it.On the other post we made Book One to look like the real ration book. I am making a simple version for book two after doing a study on this once before.So I took some card stock, (thick paper ......

This book one was Issued to the public in May of 1942. At first it was used to ration sugar and later other coupons in this book were used for other products.All coupons have numbers.There were stamps inside the book which were numbered 1 through 28. The stamps 1 through 4 were the first stamps to be used for sugar. Each stamp would get you one pound of sugar but you could not use all of them at once, there was a limit of how much sugar you could get and a time period in which you could use your stamp such as a two week period.Charles made the one on the bottom, if you notice the numbering system. The number 1.2.3.4 started bottom right.I am going to explain how to make ......

Charles and I had our talk as we do this time of year about what history project we want to do and Charles said that he really enjoyed our year of 1943 that we did six years ago (2015). We talked about what we learned and how we felt there was so much more to learn. We decided that we are going to re-visit 1943 including the rationing. This will be this new year of 2022 living like the past history project. This is a long post, there is a lot to explain and there will be more simple posts to come with more information after this post.We have been studying the 1930s great depression for a few years now and I have not shared much of that because of how po ......

I am still on break but I wanted to pop in to say we are doing okay here. I have needed this time off and still need more time but I do not like it when someone that has a blog just disappears. You all feel like family so I do want to have at least a short visit with you. I am not answering emails for the time right now because I am not on my computer very much. The first two weeks I did not do much of anything, my brain and body needed a rest. I went back to the eye doctor today and he said my eyes are still healing and I am doing good. He wants to keep an eye on the small clot in the back of the left eye and feels that it is absorbing and doing ......

I want to let you all know that I will be taking a break from posting. I do not know how long this break will be but do not worry, I will be back. I rarely take a break, I have been posting since 2005 under the name of Generations Before us first and then Gdonna.com (G stands for Grandma). I outgrew my space and lost many posts in a reorganize and then in 2011 the post have been pretty much every week, at times more often. I have had eye surgery recently, and I have a bad flare with Meniere's disease which I have had for a long time. It is pretty awful right now, the symptoms are vertigo, balance issues and terrible noise in my ears. On top of that I h ......

Beautiful color everywhere we look.It is a beautiful fall here in the southeast part of the United States. Cooler weather is slipping in and many things are being harvested.Cotton, peanuts, hay, citrus and fall vegetables.I am layering the bedding, first was the flannel sheets and then the first quilt and now my favorite winter quilt that was stored away at the end of spring.We have started the harvest of our lemons and satsumas and sharing them with friends and family.Warm meat pies and biscuits and gravy around our home.I have been sewing and mending and doing my best to catch up around the house.I asked Charles to take me to see the fall colors and visit the town north of us called ......

Last week was a good week, I feel that I have been making better progress on organizing our home. I am adjusting our home for change because we need different things as we grow through life. This week is a busy week because I have a good bit of sewing to do and it seems that everything is in need of something. I am sure many of you can understand this.One reason I have much to do is that our little cockatiel Belle is molting and prickly and needs some special attention. She loves it when I put her in a blanket and rock her and sing to her. She also appreciates it when I massage and fluff around her prickles because they are very irritating. The prickles are ......

This morning we had our first frost. This time of year our citrus trees are starting to ripen but are still not ready for harvest. Several years ago I would be very concerned and start tossing blankets over the citrus and doing my best to wrap them when I knew a frost was coming but I soon realized that they would make it through a frost and I was doing more damage than good trying to help them. A few more weeks and we should be able to start harvesting. This coming weekend the temperature may get down to 37 Degrees / 3 degrees Celsius. That is still not a freeze so this is good.We share our citrus with some friends from India and they are very ......

We have dropped below 50 degrees / 10 degrees Celsius and finally the flannel can come back out again. This weekend we are supposed to drop to 41 degrees / 5 degrees Celsius and I am so happy :), I have rearranged our pajama drawers, pulled my warm flannel tops and cardigan sweaters forward. I happily pulled everything off this shelf and pulled the flannel sheets and pillowcases from the back corner. It is a good day!This morning I washed and hung out the cotton sheets that will move to the back corner of the linen shelf to join the other sets. We rotate two sets of sheets for summer and two sets for winter. We also keep an extra set of each put back. W ......

I have been working on a new household schedule. Two months ago I purchased a daily appointment book. I decide that if I was going to keep our house more organized that I needed to pencil in all the things that needed to be done and I soon found out that there is not enough hours in the day.So I look back in time because that is what I like to do. Above is a 1932 grocery ad, the month of April. In the past shopping was normally done once a week and on a certain day, being that there was money for food during this time.Many years ago I would take my mother-in-law grocery shopping and we would go on a Thursday and she would buy nearly the same food each week. She k ......

Our latest research has been about food. Charles and I have been studying and doing history projects for many years now because we want to know all we can about what was it really like in the home many years ago.Recently in a post I mentioned that I have researched our family tree for many years and also we had DNA taken. The past few months we decided that we want to try eating traditional meals that our ancestors ate. I am starting to understand more about the many recipes such as the Sunday Roast and the recipes for pies and casseroles. There are history articles about the history of the casserole and such as that but like we do about all o ......

This photo is of my Grandmother in the year 1908.And this is a few years before she passed away. She was a wonderful, kind, loving, humble and Godly woman. I have been very fortunate to have many special women in my life and even those that lived further away and I did not get to see as often had lasting impressions on me that I never forget.They had strength and gentleness that is missing today and I cannot put into words to explain the differences of long ago and now other than they were good people and there was something very right about how they lived. My grandmother is the second from the left of the five women seen in the photo. The next two women next ......

People come up with sayings such as we should not live in the past or never look back. These are just words that someone says. We know that we cannot live in the past but we can live like the past. I enjoy looking back, there is so much to learn from the past and I get a lot of clarity when I do look back at history and also study about our ancestors.I love the old textiles and the embroidery on my vintage aprons. Charles and I have been studying the home front and the life inside the home for many years now and we have learned about our Ancestors and how people lived without all of the modern items that we have today and so much more.For the last few y ......

I have been looking forward to the new season of Fall and here it is now where we live. The daytime temperatures are still uncomfortably warm but they are gradually going down. We have had a few cooler days where I could open the windows and leave them open most of the day. It is more pleasant when I go out to hang the laundry and this makes me want to do a good washing of everything before cold weather gets here. I have been cooped up inside with air conditioning because I could not tolerate the hotter temperature so now I plan to soon enjoy being able to being outside and do not want to miss any beautiful day. There is still very dense vegetation ......

Charles purchased a fresh ginger root this past week and we have been enjoying fresh warm ginger tea with lemon and honey. We have ginger growing in pots in our yard but they are not ready to harvest. The glass is from a set of glasses that Charles Father bought him for drinking root beer a very long time ago and now we use them when we want a special glass as I did this time with warm ginger tea. The first few days of last weeks internet outage was quite frustrating but then I decided that I needed this to happen because I started feeling better about it all on the third day of the outage. Each day that went by I started questio ......

This is Tim, Grandma Donna's son. Mom asked me to let you know that their internet is down and due to Covid there is a long wait for service repairs so there will be no post this week. Here is a photo of Frank, Katherine's brother. She also wanted me to remind you there are many years of post on this blog and for me to show you how to go back to read the old posts. See below: And asked me to put at least one or two pictures up of something we have that is vintage so you have something nice to look at and to tell you all to have a safe week. So here is a photo of my 1960's Gibson Three Hundred guitar amplifier. I'm not sure if that is what she meant but that's how I (rock and) roll.

I am back at my desk this morning after quite an interesting day of storms that produced severe thunderstorms and tornadoes and it ended last night at our house like the grand finale of a fourth of July fireworks show. A family member called to say there were 7 tornados in all this commotion yesterday, three touched down. This all came from the last of the trailing feeder bands attached to hurricane Ida. The last tail pushed south of us back into the gulf which makes me wonder what all that will do as it drags over central Florida and out into the Atlantic, if that is where it goes.Yesterday's post was about organizing our first aid cabinets out of necessity.It ma ......

I can see that life is going on all around us even during this critical time that we are living.Somehow a seed was planted in this small crevice and this plant grew despite it's location. It has had just enough nutrients and water to give it life. Even when we have been planted in the middle of a crevice or two busy and very loud roads as where we live, we can still blossom. The last eighteen months have been a trying time for many people but we can find balance. It may be organizing our household, business or talking with a friend to find that balance. A different perspective can help us when we are in the middle of a ......