Lessons for the kitchen

I used to like to bake. I might still enjoy it, but for some reason (probably stress) it's hard for me to get motivated to do anything in the kitchen these days. Perhaps once there aren't so many needy people in my house I'll be able to enjoy it again.

But that's a tangent to what I came to talk to you about.

When I bake, cook, wash dishes, or do pretty much anything in the kitchen, I usually get messy. The front of my clothing is often covered in flour, and gets wet when I wash dishes. When I wash dishes after I've been baking, I end up with paste on my waist.

This morning I discovered a way to avoid getting my shirt messy. Cook in the nude! My stomach is much quicker and easier to clean than is my shirt. However I wouldn't recommend it for cooking bacon.

(I have no idea where this picture originated. It looks like it's from a magazine. I got it from another blog, I think, quite a while ago.)

I only have one class today, and that's not until 3:30. My other two classes were canceled for today. Everyone else is at work or school, and my clothes are in the dryer, hence the baking in the nude. There are many things I would like to accomplish today, studying being first and foremost. I also need to sew a costume shirt for Light. The day started off on the late foot when I slept until 10:30 this morning. But I had an awesome dream about flirting and falling in love/lust!

I have already accomplished a few things. I bathed. That's always a good way to start the day, and something that, on bad days, I skip. So it's a good sign. I iterated laundry, and baked a blueberry buckle coffee cake thingie. I just now took it out of the oven. It has to cool a bit before I taste it. And here's a blog post, something that I've been meaning to get around to for a few days. The kitchen is clean, all the dishes washed and counters and table wiped down. I finally put away the hand mixer that Diva left out last week after she baked a cake. It's been sitting on one of the chairs at the table for days. So all in all, I'm feeling mostly good about my morning's accomplishments. And I needed the sleep, so I'm not going to beat myself up about sleeping late.

But alas, I have yet to do anything that is actually on my list of things to accomplish, so I'm off to do that which needs to be done. TTFN

Holidaze

We should do away with most if not all of the current holidays. There is just too much emotional baggage and expectation surrounding our current holidays. Too much commercialism, too.

Celebration days are important to the emotional health of individuals and communities, so we still need some. Traditions are important, too, which messes with my proposition that we discontinue the current crop of holidays. 

When I was a kid in school I despised those breaks in routine that were intended to boost school spirit or whatever the excuse was. Pep Rallies. OMG. Hate them! Spirit week, when the students and teachers were encouraged to dress in the school colors, wear funny hats, wear their clothes inside out, etc. So tedious. These were opportunities  for bullies to be more obnoxious than usual, and the A-list crowd to outshine the dullards like me. 

So is that my problem with holidays? Or do I just not like the disruption of my routine? I suspect one of the problems is my high expectations for myself. I have a mental list of things I didn't do that I wanted to do over the Christmas break. Wanted to make a gingerbread house, quilt a Christmas stocking for Diva. (The rest of us each have a hand quilted stocking that I made. Diva was the last member to join the family, and has been with us for almost 10 years. I still haven't made her stocking.) I wanted to sew a couple of aprons for Light. I had some ideas about making some ornaments with the children. I also wanted to give Sproing a couple of long division problems to work on each day, just to keep his mind fresh. He had just about gotten the concept before the break. We shall see when he gets back to school whether he can still do long division.  

This pile of junk in front of my closet is still here. That was another project on my mental list of things to do during the holiday break. I want to clean out my room, get rid of a lot of the stuff in here, rearrange and re-purpose what's left. Our bed needs a bit of repair, and has to be partially disassembled to do that. In order for that to happen the area all around and under the bed must be cleaned out. We need to move the bed slightly, too. It isn't close enough to the wall on two sides. It needs to be moved about 6 or 8 inches (15-20 cm) closer to the north and east walls of the room. I have wanted to do that for probably about as long as I have needed to cover the living room walls. We need to rip up the carpet in here and replace it with laminate flooring. It smells like dying dog now. Ick. 

I suppose I'm a glass-half-empty person. Or I'm in that mood today anyway. OK, to make my therapist(s) happy, I'm going to now list some things I did accomplish over the last 2 weeks.

a) survived Christmas without committing murder or having a nervous break down (Except that tiny one earlier this week. It only lasted about 4 hours so we're not going to count it.)

b) cooked a festive holiday meal nearly all by myself

c) hardly stressed out at all that the holiday meal was 2 days after the holiday

d) cooked quite a few family meals while Indigo was here this week

e) hosted Indigo for a week, gave him lots of hugs, helped him feel safe here

f) painted some of the trim in Light's new room (the one recently vacated by C and S)

g) designed and decorated our not-a-tree

h) got almost all the gifts I needed to provide a more or less merry Christmas for the kiddies

I don't feel much better, though, having listed my accomplishments. I also broke the damned washing machine again last week. It's fixed now, thanks to Superman and the part he ordered. I feel really guilty about breaking it, though. He fixed it this afternoon, and finished washing the load I had put in. He asked me if I had paid attention to what all I was putting in the machine. He said it was extremely overloaded. I remember loading it up, but for some reason it didn't strike me at the time that I was putting too much into the thing. Obviously I was wrong. 

Tomorrow is another day. I don't know if that's good or bad.