Hello dear reader!! And welcome to Home Ec.

Lol when I think of the number of blogs I’ve started…well it reminds me of the numerous diaries I have from my childhood. It always seems like such a good idea at the time: really appeals to my desire to chronicle what happens in my life, allows me the outlet to create something, and serves as therapy to work through life at the time. The problem is that I can never seem to stick with it. So this time I’m just going to try and roll with the fact that I jump around from thing to thing to keep myself interested, and will just do so in this blog, even just in the hopes that that will help me to keep it going more than a post or two. Yes, I will let myself write a random article about the fact that I used to save cash in a piggy bank using a self-imposed “sin tax,” or one on the different types of fermented vegetables I think taste best, or an article chronicling our journey to make our ’86 4Runner actually run. I used to have a blog in which I described myself as a “jack of all trades” which I think is meant to be an insult, but I have been trying to re-brand, because, fuck it, it’s who I am!

At the same time, I crave consistency for this blog because I want it to be thoughtful and honestly, one-day, a beautiful compiled resource. So when I was thinking about starting this blog I thought: god how am I going to make a good blog with all of my various interests. You really need to have a theme to make good content in my opinion. But then I realized “OH BUT WAIT THEY DO RELATE!” My group of interests are called “homemaking” and essentially it is the art of running a household and all that that entails: managing the finances, hosting parties, raising children, renovating the kitchen, preserving your garden vegetables. As it turns out, what I thought was just some random set of things I’m interested in, is actually so much a thing that it was taught in every high school in America for a very long time, though when I was in high school I thought I was too good (read: modern woman) for it: Home Economics, or “How to Manage a Household with Finite Resources.” And so that is what I propose to make this blog about.

Main topics for the blog will include (in order of amount I know about them):

1. Personal Finances
2. Historical Cooking
3. Homesteading in the Suburbs

Some consistent things you can expect from the blog:

• Awesome playlists to pair with your reading
• Links to other amazing bloggers
• An article once a week

The twist, I would say, or what makes this blog even remotely necessary in a sea of personal finance blogs is that I am going to do my darndest to tie everything back to history. Why? Because I love history and because while I think I know it all, I think history will prove to be a more reliable and trustworthy source on homemaking than a 31 year-old who has only ever lived since the invention of a dishwasher, worked a series of client/customer-facing non-production jobs, and only recently had her first baby or gotten married.

I haven’t yet decided how much of me I want to publish in this blog so let me start by defining myself with these few things:

• I grew up relatively lower-middle class so have a stick up my butt about how to manage money correctly
• I love history and spend lots of time watching movies, reading books, and owning and doing things that make me feel closer to the past
• Cooking is currently my only creative outlet, but I used to be a hipster and therefore did photography and painting and drawing and even tagging through a short stint with a graffiti-artist boyfriend
• I am married / I work full-time in a demanding career / I am a mother to one girl / I am mixed / I am Ivy League educated / I am American by Birth and Southern by the Grace of God
• I fall short of my high expectations all the time, and need to learn to better manage said high expectations

It is my sincere hope that I can make this blog great, keep up with it, share some knowledge, learn some tidbits, and make a great community of like-minded folks people (I HATE the world folks now because it has just been absolutely co-opted by the worst politicians and advertisers trying to sound “real,” “Good god man, get a job!”) . And worst case scenario, I hope this helps me spend better and have a chronicle of some things I was interested in in my life. One thing that I hope will help me to write more consistently is to have a more honest voice when writing so I don’t have to keep up with some character. So far, so good.

P.S. Phew! Honestly have to say it’s a relief to have the intro done and off my back. For whatever reason it has really been holding me back from starting. Actually I know exactly that it is the same issue I wrote about: how do I encapsulate everything I want to do in one theme, one post, one introduction? Have a feeling this will not be the last!