This Year's Box

Everyone's doing the iPod valentine lately - here's our version. Used a cereal box. It was fun to do. Family Fun has a great version of the iLove valentine on their website.

It Wasn't Pretty

Sorry, no pictures of the bread. It was pretty much a complete disaster. Heavy as a brick and not really any pumpernickel properties at all. It was the wrong color and the whole wheat overpowered the molasses, cocoa, and caraway.

The little scheduling experiment is working pretty well, though. Haven't quite reached nirvana - but I've lost my resentment towards work really quickly - actually enjoying it again. Weird.

Hitting all kinds of child rearing milestones this week. One of which is our very last school party ever. It's making me a little sad to think we don't have any more valentine boxes, toilet paper mummy races, or winter holiday bingo games ahead of us. It's just not fair how it all slips through your fingers. My new philosophy on adolesence is that the rebellion isn't so much for the kid to want to test his wings as it is preparation for the parent to accept (or eagerly anticipate) the separation. Somewhat akin to the misery of the last few weeks of pregnancy.

So, I'm hoping for a quiet weekend, I have two netflix envelopes waiting for me, a zillion projects to work on, an out of control pantry that needs attention, and maybe even Coraline. We'll just have to see.

the best blog post EVER

I'm trying something new. Instead of letting each part of life "infringe" on the other I'm going to try a little scheduling discipline.

That's pretty vague, isn't it? Here's an example: my work life is out of control. So, instead of wasting my precious personal time trying (unsuccessfully) to catch up I'm going to keep work within its proscribed timeframe. My theory is that if I can do that then I'll be happy and content (due to the absolute Nirvana that my personal life has become) that I'll become absolutely unencumbered by any external worries and my mind will focus (like a laser beam) on my work.

What? It could TOTALLY work.

Shut up, it could so work.

The other part is I'm trying to focus more on keeping forward motion on each task rather than focusing on completion. Nothing is ever done, it's just depressing.

Moving on...

Something much more exciting is the big box from King Arthur Flour that was delivered yesterday. Oh, yeah, there's some homemade, whole grain Pumpernickel bread in my future. According to the experts (John) Pumpernickel is tricky and best made using a combination of a pre-levain AND day old bread. I have a fairly simple recipe to start with that doesn't employ either of these techniques, we'll just have to see how it works out. Baby steps for me...(although I have graduated to using a scale as opposed to those measuring cups the amateurs use). If it's pretty I'll post a picture.