We have been doing some serious organizing the past few months. Our goal has been to catch up on repairs and organizing the house. We will never be finished because we live here but we have made much improvement.
We have decided to go back to the early 1940's again. Those of you that follow my blog know we did the one year experiment of living like 1943. We wanted to learn about how it was to live in the home front during 1943 and learn about the rations. We learned so much more than we expected during that time. We moved to 1948 for awhile to see if that was where we wanted to be but because of the upcoming election we started keeping up with the news so we could make a decision how to vote and we became slack and started merging back to today's time.
We have missed our 1943 life so we have decided to go back and settle into a more simple life of 1942.
I know some of you may not understand why we would want to live like this but we don't like today's world as it is so why not? Today's time just does not make sense and since we both love history and challenges we enjoy these kind of projects.
Since we cannot live "in" 1942 we can live "like" 1942. We have some exceptions since we cannot simulate the times completely but we can live very much like it was back then by living a simple life and self ration ourselves, be very conservative and we have old books that we can follow to keep us on track.
Rationing was very different in 1942 compared to 1943. In 1943 rationing was really getting ramped up and rationing was complicated and very serious.
In 1942 we are just going into rationing since we did not become involved in the war until the attack on Pearl Harbor December 7th 1941.
When we did our one year experiment before, we picked the year 1943 because it had the most intense rationing and we wanted to learn about it but we missed some things by skipping 1942.
We will go back to the 1942 newspapers because we learn a lot from reading the daily news during that time. Our President will be Franklin Delano Roosevelt and my husband will be reading his Biography. During our one year living like 1943 he read the biography of George S Patton.
We try to keep our lives interesting and do the unusual and we educate ourselves by doing these things. Just because we are getting older does not mean we have to stop learning so we continue no matter what our age.
There is much history and news about world war 2, but very little home front information. We found that by reading the newspapers and articles that did exist we could learn much by trying to live it, to simulate it. This is our way of learning more about it.
We have some wonderful books that we will be following for cooking, recipes, housekeeping and I will share with you as we learn new things including cooking a dish called the English Monkey.
Of course outside our house we must remain in the current year. I told my husband if I should start getting Dementia and the doctor does that test and ask me who is the President and I say Franklin D Roosevelt and the year is 1942, to back me up and explain to the doctor that actually I am right on!
I am looking forward to this New Year of 1942 :) We have been preparing ourselves for this change. We have gotten many big repairs and projects out of the way and this will help us to not worry about these pending things.
Last time we had a few blog friends to join us on our new history challenge. One in Australia and one in Utah have remained living this simple 1940s life. You are welcome to join us too, it is quite interesting to live "like" the 1940s or just to live a more simple life.
Sugar and Coffee are two of the foods that will be rationed during 1942. This will not affect us personally on the coffee because we have remained on the coffee ration since our experiment. The sugar ration will be good for us to go back to as we have not kept that ration and we need to cut back on sugar. Other goods such as tires and rubber are also being rationed.
By the time 1942 ended there were 9 items rationed and I am not sure what all of those items were since we studied 1943 last time.
Our small secret garden will be our new victory garden. Our tiny one in our front yard became our blueberry garden this year which is still a very good thing. We will move to a new location in our yard for our vegetables. We must have a victory garden living like 1942 and I hope we will be able to do some canning. We have had two below freezing days recently and our little garden still has a few green foods growing.
We are officially going into winter this week so there is not much we can do about gardening but come spring we will grow as much as we can in our small space. I hope our permaculture plants will help us out with some jams and jellies.
I am currently crocheting chair booties for our dining room chairs. This is something I needed to invent for our chairs to keep them from scratching up the floors. I will do a post on them at another time.
Grandma Donna
