26 April 2003

I am eating a flour tortilla spread with Nutella, with sliced strawberries throughout. Yummmmmmm.

There was a very bored sample-giving lady in the grocery store -- well, it was 1:30 on a Friday afternoon, and it was raining. Nobody was in there but me. So she started quizzing me on the contents of my cart: what did I use the fresh cilantro for? What was I going to do with all those mushrooms? Goodness, how had I learned to cook all that? What was I going to make first? Well, I wasn't entirely sure, but I had started the rosemary buns yesterday, so I speculated that it would be something to go with them. (It was not; Mark took me out for Thai. Angry trout, wooo!) And she said, "You make bread, too? Well, bless your heart! In a bread machine?" I said no, and she blessed my heart some more. Repeatedly. Asked what I did for a living. More heart blessings.

I sometimes forget how many people never do anything I consider cooking. We have soup ingredients and all kinds of other things to do around here, but I don't consider them all that ambitious. It's just food. Lots of fresh veggies and fruit in the fridge and on the counter, but...just food.

The rosemary buns turned out well -- half of them. The recipe was...a trifle misleading in a few spots, and contained at least one direct self-contradiction. But I fixed it up for half the batch, and now I know what to do next time. And there will certainly be a next time, as it's only supposed to make 12 buns, and I managed to fix up five of them, so...we each had one when they were warm, and then Timprov had another last night...yeah. We need more rosemary buns.

I wrestled with writing stuff and the rosemary buns until around 5:30, and then Timprov came out into the kitchen and looked at me and told me I didn't have to make dinner. And repeated it until I believed him -- that he or Mark could make something or we could go out, but I didn't have to cook. And that was a good deal more of a relief than it should be. Everything has felt harder than usual in the last few days. I keep trying to keep working and keep up on my chores and all that, but I just feel like it all takes more energy than usual, mentally, physically, emotionally, whatever. And I'm not sure how to respond to that.

Timprov thinks I should give myself a bit of a break and not do so much that I wear myself out. Maybe he's right. I really can't tell if that will give me a chance to refresh and rejuvenate, or whether it'll just mean that the things I don't get done will weigh on me more. I'm also having a hard time figuring out what I should be trying to get done next week. We had a call in for Amber about Monday, but I don't know if she'll be able to hang out then. Tuesday and Wednesday, I will be running what Liz calls M'ris' Daycare For Wayward Adults -- probably driving out to the coast at least once, doing other fun stuff like that with Liz and Tor out visiting. Thursday afternoon is a doctor's appointment for Timprov. There may be more Liz stuff (or more Liz-and-Tor stuff -- we don't know) later in the week, too, and I don't want to spend the time they're out here fussing about not finishing the next chapter or the draft of a short story or something. On the other hand, I don't want to lose momentum on the Not The Moose, because it's big and scary and daunting, and being able to attack little chunks of it often is how I handle that big, scary, dauntingness.

I think I need to apply that to the next several months, too, actually. They're big, they're scary, and they're daunting -- and I only have to do a little of them at a given time. Less than a day, usually.

Anyway. I've been pretty good at getting myself back on track when I get off track -- in life, if not in journal entries. So maybe it's time to just let things slide a little bit and see what comes of it. See what I find the time and energy to do. Let it take its own course.

I am very, very bad at letting things take their own course.

Ah well. I finished Silver Pigs and got a little more annoyed with the scene breaking towards the end of the book. There were line-skips seemingly at random -- sometimes they indicated that time had passed, and sometimes they did not, and they came very frequently. Sometimes two or three times a page. Bleah. But it was a decent enough story, and that's what I was looking for. Now I'm reading Leah Cutter's Paper Mage. It's had a lot of cultural exposition without annoying me with the "Ooooh, look how foreign" attitude some writers get, so that's decent so far, and I have hopes for the rest of it. It's sadly not Lori's book, but I have to accept, sooner or later, that not every fantasy novel set in China is going to be Lori's book. I think it'll be easier to accept once Lori finds a publisher so that I can actually read the rest of her book. I hope so, anyway. China's a mighty big place to be firmly attached to one person.