Recent Posts

close up of a wool tapestry weaving showing mountains and sky

Project: Tapestry Weaving on My Lap Loom

Diving into fiber arts, I warped my tapestry loom and set to work. Here's what I made and the weaving skills I'm working on.
book cover of Sprawl Repair Manual by Gail Tachieva

How Do We Fix Sprawl? Book Review: Sprawl Repair Manual by Gail Tachieva

Suburbia sprawls endlessly. Cities are insolvent. Entire neighborhoods slump into disrepair. How can we fix it all? This practical manual details a difficult, but doable, way forward.
close up of embroidered flowers on black fabric

Modern Quality: Where Do We Get Beautiful Things?

If you go to any major store, most of the stuff you can buy is cheaply made and ugly. Why? Quality and beauty make us happier and healthier. Where can we find them?
a young girl three and a half years old sits on a rock in the mountains in Glacier National Park, looking down at a flower in her hand

How Do I Raise My Kids to Revere Life, Love What Is Good, and Reject the Bad?

I don't want to raise the next generation of materialist, short-term focused consumers. But how do I help my kids counter modern culture, resist temptations, and internalize the right ideas?
close up of embroidered flowers on the edge of a linen skirt

How I Made A Linen Wrap Skirt With Rainbow Embroidered Flowers

Women's clothing is so often function or pretty—but rarely both. This project was my attempt to bridge that gap by making my own wrap skirt and learning embroidery to decorate it!
the glassy water of the spokane river winds through banks of rounded river rocks, pine trees standing tall on the far side of the river and in the distance around the river bend

Seven Principles to Guide Development in Kootenai County

Our county faces rapid suburbanization and dramatic change of character as farmland is devoured by big development. Here are seven conservative principles we can use to guide the county’s future.
the cloisters at gloucester cathedral: the intersection of two long stone hallways lined with windows, stained glass, and elaborate archways

Recovering Beauty in Modern Life

Beauty is vital to humans, but there's a breakdown of beauty in present culture—in architecture, art, music, more. Why? How can we recover and cultivate beauty?

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About

We're Jacqueline and Randy, a blogging duo with backgrounds in tech, robots, art, and writing, now raising our family in northern Idaho.

Our goal is to encourage deliberate choices, individual responsibility, and lifelong curiosity by sharing stories about our adventures in living, loving, and learning.

Learn more about us.


Connect:

whoo@deliberateowl.com

Start here

Curious about our life and journey? Here are some good places to start reading:

Jacqueline and Randy leaning their heads together smiling at the camera

A Blog About Education, Lifestyles, and Community

A brief history of how the Deliberate Owl came to be and why we're writing a blog about us, our lives, and how we're living out our values.
Priests in red and gold celebrate a traditional Latin Mass

Discovering the Traditional Catholic Mass

How I discovered the traditional Latin Mass a few years ago, why that discovery changed everything for me, and what was wrong with the Novus Ordo Masses I'd attended.