(This was supposed to go live this afternoon but I screwed up).
Last weekend I made one of my favorite bread recipes, Maryetta’s oatmeal bread from Beard on Bread.
That’s significant because I think I’ve been in a funk about cooking for a while. I still cook and the food is healthy but I’ve been relying on the same old recipes much more than usual. I can’t pin down a reason but possibly I’m getting back into the swing of it. I cooked a couple of new recipes recently too.
Another shift or tentative shift is that devoting Friday to blogging and email isn’t working as well as I want. For whatever reason I seem to be getting a lot more email (legit stuff, not spam) and it takes me a lot more time to get through it. Then I don’t get all my blogging done — this week I only had one post at Atomic Junk Shop, reposting an old column about the loneliness of Ebenezer Scrooge.
Another shift: Snowdrop hanging around. It was so cold this week that TYG took Wisp into the bedroom at night, closed the door and had me sleep in the spare room. That way when I woke up I could invite Snowdrop in without Wisp trying to bolt. That let me lure him to the couch to sit with me where it was warm.
He’s happy to sit next to me and doze for hours — he’ll even do it before he asks for food. But only as long as the door’s open. It can only be slightly open; I froze my butt off quite a bit this week. Still, the closer he gets to maybe, possibly becoming an indoor cat …
Workwise, this week was frustrating. I was on the brink of finishing this editing go-round for Southern Discomfort (one edit-my-edits round to go, then done. No, seriously, done). However Carrboro — the town I cover — filed a lawsuit against Duke Energy yesterday, charging the utility knew for decades that climate change was a problem, did nothing and lied about it. That’s big news — governments have sued oil and coal companies but not utilities — so I had to research it, call people, interview them and write the thing. Which is now live.
I’m now within thirty pages of the end. However I’ve made so many changes in so many places it’ll take one final round of proofreading to make sure I didn’t throw in some mistakes along the way. It can still be done this month.
That was pretty much it. I’d planned to get some Jekyll and Hyde done but the newspaper work took care of that. Still it’s good work, and it pays. That’s why I don’t turn it down very often.
Oh, and my copy of The Ceaseless Way arrived in the mail. I’m so happy to have it in hard copy — and to be free of working on it.
You can buy it in paperback or ebook. Cover by GetCovers based on concepts by Arden Brooks.
