Returning to the life of
washing litter boxes and attempting to write (can't
return to the driving kids to piano part because the new
teacher comes to the house) is proving to be harder than
I might have imagined had I been imagining it. Working at
startup pace and then suddenly not is a little like
jamming on the brakes when you're driving at highway
speed. I keep wanting to accomplish something every day.
The trouble is what to accomplish?
I picked up the newsletter at the
printer first thing this morning in the freezing cold.
The printer is conveniently located next to Perfecto's so
was able to get coffee too. Not that that counts as
accomplishment.
Roy's got his own system for
washing the dishes and litter boxes now and I have to
learn to do it his way. I ended up drying the dishes and
then folding laundry and loading the washer and dryer
this morning before sweeping the office floor and
returning home to stuff newsletters into envelopes. I
spent the afternoon drinking tea and stuffing envelopes.
A fitting thing to do in the freezing cold.
Have I mentioned it's freezing
cold? I don't think the temperature has got into double
digits here all day and now with night closing in the
cold is penetrating into my house. Brrr.
So one of the things I've been
doing to get a feeling of accomplishment and to keep warm
is making soup. I'm trying different soup recipes at
least once a week. Last Tuesday I made miso soup with
kale. It was pretty good right off the stove but much
much better on Wednesday when it had a chance to sit
overnight. Yesterday's soup was hominy corn chowder. The
hardest part of that was finding canned hominy - not
exactly widely popular in New England but I found it in
the "International" section of Market Basket. The chowder
was fantastic! The only thing it lacked was a little
black pepper.
It's not that I don't have any
black peppercorns on hand. Nope. It's that I haven't used
the pepper mill in ages, since before joining Starship
Startup, and it did not want to function. Not only were
the batteries dead but the compartment where you put the
peppercorns was stuck shut. I could not get it open to
insert peppercorns. Then once I got the peppercorn part
open the battery compartment stuck shut, which is weird
because when I first took the mill out of the cabinet the
top of the battery compartment fell off and I had just
put it back on. Not having anything I could use to
improvise a mortar and pestle, I left out the black
pepper. And like I said the chowder was fine. I just
reheated today's portion (all these soups make enough for
several meals for one) and garnished it with grated
pepperjack cheese and it was awesome.
My cooking adventures are a lot
like chemistry experiments, requiring precise
measurements of ingredients and cooking times. It must be
the engineer in me. I can't just throw a bunch of
ingredients together intuitively and have it
work.
The chemistry experiments give me a
feeling of structure and accomplishment that I am not
getting from writing lately (or ever?). It occurred to me
that yesterday's
entry, unlike yesterday's
soup experiment, just didn't cut it. If I needed more
proof that I can't write, that was it. I'm fine when I
write about software, hardware, even birds or funny
travel stories, but when it comes to expressing deep
personal emotions like heart-pounding fear and anxiety,
for example, I fall flat. Y'know I'm just the kind of
person who says "Drink plenty of fluids, wear sunscreen,
and duck when the shooting starts" instead of "I love
you, come back from the war alive."
At least the chemistry experiments
are promising.
