It’s been a little quiet here on the blog — maybe you noticed?
I’m still here, entirely alive. It’s just — well, remember that course I mentioned back when the world was a solid piece of ice? I’m now four months into the six-month program and working ’round the clock.
Actually, that’s a lie. I’ve been making myself keep work hours. Or trying to, anyway. Weekdays, my goal is to get 3-4 hours of work done in the morning (video editing/filming/zoom calls at home) and then the same amount in afternoon (email/script writing), often at a coffee shop in town.
To crystalize the division between work and non-work, at the end of the day I shut everything down — work account, video editing software, Discord chat — and then I yell to no one in particular, SYSTEMS SHUTTING DOWN, a la Cal Newport.
Weekends are still a little iffy. Sometimes I succumb to partial work days — video editing is tedious and the more I can spread it out, the more productive I am — but I’m getting better at sticking to my guns. I know I need the break, even though I kinda freak out at the end of the week because what am I going to do for two whole days without my work?
Why write a blog post, m’dear. That’s what!
Actually, my weekends are mostly for getting done all the things I don’t do during the week — i.e. cooking and playing and chillin’ on the porch. Anything other than thumbnails, market research, and tracking software.
Take today, for example. Here’s what I’ve done thus far. (As I type, it’s 3:14 p.m. on Saturday.)
I woke up before 6 to go on my first-ever trail run with my daughter-in-law. I had no idea what to expect, but it was pretty darn fun: a new setting, focused running (i.e. trying not to fall), dense green, quiet, darkly wooded, and it used a totally different set of muscles. I feel the run in my legs now, but it’s a good feeling.
I was planning to make a Gruyere today, but on our drive home from the trail run, my husband called to say that the calves got out during the night. So, no fresh milk which meant I wouldn’t have enough to make a big wheel.
So I switched to Plan B: process as much of the week’s stockpiled milk as possible so I don’t have to do it next week (when I will be making that Gruyere). Specifically, this meant: 3+ gallons of yogurt, a double batch of ice cream base (hot weather is coming!), pasteurizing cream for the week’s coffees, skimming the rest of the milks. (The skimmed milk, I clabbered for the pigs. The cream, I stuffed in the freezer for a future butter experiment.)
I made 3-ingredient pancakes for breakfast — cottage cheese, rolled oats, eggs (and salt). I thought they might be a bust, but they were actually pretty yummy: dense without being gummy and with a lovely nuttiness. My husband said they weren’t amazing but he wasn’t offended by them either. Translation: they’re better than oatmeal and not as good as ordinary pancakes.
Friends are coming for supper tonight, so I thawed some steaks, baked two chocolate loaf cakes with peanut butter cup-lined bottoms, and I made a rockin’ Moroccan carrot salad and another batch of onion relish. I washed a bunch of dishes, made multiple trips out to the cheese cave to monitor my husband’s progress — newsflash: THE CAVE HAS RUNNING WATER — and then I fizzled out.
I still need to make a potato salad and chop up a watermelon for next week, and I want to make a menu for the week and then knock out a few more staples — but I can do that tomorrow. No need to tucker myself out entirely.
(There is still a chance I’ll get a little wild and make some corn tortillas to go with tonight’s supper. I made corn tortillas last week and the leftovers, reheated, were wonderful with onion relish, scrambled eggs, and wedges of fresh ricotta salata, mmm.)
Now it’s time to gather my nerve and go wash down the porch furniture and scrub the kitchen stove. Company will be here soon!
This same time, years previous: lassi, pepper jack cheese, the coronavirus diaries: week 66, barbecue sauce, up, up, up to Utuado, taking flight, reverberations, a photo book, spinach dip.
