Sympathy for the Donners

How's everyone enjoying being cooped up inside with your family? Or alone?

I'm...well. I haven't bitten or killed anyone.

Yet.

Ah, yes. An oldie gif, but a goodie. And I still pronounce that hard-G GIF, not jiff. It's a moving picture, not peanut butter!

But I digress. Between washing my hands almost to stumps and trying not to day drink (I'm working from home...mostly), I can honestly say it's been an adventure. My father died last October (thankfully for him; he'd have gone absolutely spare if locked up like this for any length of time), so it's just me and my brother here taking care of Mom.

You'd think that three people could handle being confined to a 3,000 square foot property without something absolutely tragic happening, would you? Well, 1,000 feet of that is a damp, chilly basement with a cat who does NOT want us telecommuting from his home, and each of us needs way more than 600 square feet of buffer space to maintain civility. It's been maybe four weeks since I started working from home, two and a half of which has been at the "no, we're not going for take out" level of isolation, and we started snapping at each other this weekend.

I fear for people who live with a domestic abuser, I truly do. We like each other, and it's this hard.

Anyway, I found some old yarn and have decided to make blanket squares. It's probably full of asbestos dust from when I used to knit at church (or maybe not; back then the church was cleaned regularly). Although if the fibers are that fine, I'm not sure it matters. Well, I may have 30 years or so to find out.

In other news, I have been making progress on my reading stack. Not reading at my record pace, but...I'm reading. I'll take that as a win. I've also been working on the bread baking. I made an oatmeal bread that probably shouldn't count, because while it rose and baked, I underbaked it, so it collapsed under its own weight. On the whole, a fail.

Ah, well. I still have a ton of yeast and a bunch of flour. I shall bake a proper loaf of white bread! I shall!

Here, have a pretty picture to remind us all that we will come through this!

I can't wait to go back there....

Yarn Hangover, Bread, and What I Want Out of Life

Sorta sings, doesn't it?

Thank the LORD yarn crawl 2019 is done. I was busted by the time I got to the last two shops, but then I had my car battery go out -- when the hell did car batteries go from $50USD to nearly $200USD? And why? This one lasted half the time of the $50 jobbie in my last car -- and Rex has been to and fro the vet's, and all manner of money shit and shenanigans have gone down.

And today is St. Patrick's Day, and I made stew, and bread, and Mom made corned beef, and bread pudding. And I ate way, way too much of just about everything, and the stuffed feeling I have from the food is about the same feeling I have when I think of my stash.

I will be skipping the June fiber festival, methinks. Yarn producers in my home state will just have to make bank without me. 

Which takes us to bread. I have been trying to bake a yeast loaf for years. Apparently the fact I cannot raise a yeast loaf means I'm a witch. If only I weighed less than a duck, too! So today I made a soda bread, which just reminded me that I have, for years, had a goal to make and raise a yeast loaf. I have the bread flour and two different types of yeast (quick rising and regular) and honey, if I want a honey-sweetened loaf. Now I just have to, you know, do it.

I think I'll clear a day out of my schedule next weekend to devote to the art of bread making. People have been baking risen breads for centuries! My own father is a retired baker! He is shamed by my lack of success in bread making! I must regain family honor and actually raise a loaf of bread, and then bake it into submission. I shall not fail you, ancestors. I will make a loaf of yeast bread.

Which leads to the 'what I want out of life' bit. I miss the days before all-consuming social media in my life, you know? When I actually wrote and baked and cooked dinner and did stuff. I miss that. I didn't realize how much head space digital media took up until I started thinking about abandoning it. Maybe if I hadn't gotten into Facebook and Instagram, I would have actually managed to raise a loaf by now.

And it's pernicious. You start to think that your presence there is important somehow, that you are necessary to the people you follow or watch. But on the whole, it's not. They'll tick along without you.

Humility is a thing, you know. And it's an understanding of how insignificant you actually are in the grand scheme of things. It's amazing, really. Being so small means that you can vanish here, turn up again there, do anything you want because even if I run away tomorrow -- pack my little hobo bundle on a stick and take Rex away to Somewhere Else -- there will be people to pick up the slack. I'm not irreplaceable.

I need to let people take up the slack. I've gotten in the bossy bitch habit of pushing things through because I think I'm the only one who could possibly do things, and it's more stress than I need to put on myself.

So I'm 'running away'. I'm ditching a lot of social media, going back to knitting and baking and reading and writing and trying to cope with having a dog that's smarter than me.

And honestly, no one will mind. No one but me, and I don't mind any of it. I'm looking forward to the peace and quiet, and I think it will only do me good!