Hello and Welcome...

...to the Senior Living with Chef Jo! If you expected to see this old Grandma in a rocking chair ... ya gotta another thing coming! This soon to be great-Grandma ain't dead yet! This ain't that kinda place.

What's this blog is about... to learn the back to basics ways of our foremothers and fathers before everything became convenient, instantly gratifying, and had little value.  It's called a simpler way of life, but you will work harder and enjoy more as a result. I'll be cooking, canning, preserving, prepping, gardening, and squeezing the life out of everything until I can't think of anything else I can do with it.

I'm a sexagenarian, disabled, retired chef and minister. I cooked and homesteaded one-handed on the YouTube channel Cockeyed Homestead and blogged about our adventures in self sufficient homesteading, cooking, preserving our harvests, etc on a blog with that name also for six years. 

I found an audience among disabled folks who watched my accommodations in doing...but also seniors who wanted to learn. It is rare to find folks who carried on home preserving and homesteading practices of their parents' and grandparents' time. But, I was quirky like that. I absorbed those old traditions and continued to practice them today.

Whether you are new to growing, preparing and preserving your own foods or been doing it almost half a century like I have. Come sit a while and listen, learn, and be entertained. Maybe, you'll learn to do something you hadn't done before and even try it. Maybe, you'll see something to try in a whole new light than you thought. Maybe one of my appropriated trash to treasure ideas makes you look at your would be trash in a whole new way. 

By following along, you will no longer feel useless/ and dependent, but empowered. Not impaired or disabled, but enabled by using what impairs you to prove that you CAN and ARE still worthy as a senior, disabled individual, or just a regular Joe or Jo. That trash isn't ALWAYS trash.  This disposable world needs to be turned up on its ear.

There will be honestly some things you will not be able to do immediately. Just because you can't right now doesn't mean you will never be able to do it. Just not yet! This mind set is important. You've been told your entire life... You can't! You Shouldn't. You'll never be able to. BUT, the Lord and I are telling you, YOU CAN! Your first step is getting off duff and try.

You can play in the dirt, You can make mud pies, You can play with your food. You can dance in the rain. You can do anything just about anything you put your mind to. You just have to try. So what if you don't succeed the first time or the twentieth? Did you quit? Or did you put it aside to do later? If you did, you didn't fail. You only fail if you stop trying. 

An example. Years ago, I said it was impossible to use hedge trimmers with only one functioning arm and hand. If I had stopped trying to figure out how to do it, it would have been. But, I didn't and I finally figured it out. My body took the place of my second arm. It was ungainly, an inaccurate cut, BUT I did it! No, I didn't do the whole hedge, I only did a ragged few inches before a son-in-law saved me from doing any more. But I still had bragging rights. Nobody could take that away from me. I imagine with time and practice, I might have gotten better at it. But after proving I could, I left it for others.

Granted living this way would have been a lot simpler without an artificial hip and knee, rods in my spine, and not having half my body semi paralyzed from strokes and spasticity, but where's the adventure (challenge) in that?

So now I live in a independent, senior living community where there's help available if I need it. You might be able to move the homesteader/ chef/ self sufficient gal to the city, but this old gal is still in homesteader/ chef/ self sufficient mode. Won't you come along each week to see how I do it? Maybe, you'll get an idea or two that will put you on the path towards your future. You ain't dead yet. Life finds a way and so do I. If I'm breathing, I'm pushing the neat, tidy envelop  that reads "Old and Disabled." I live each day to the fullest as God intended.