Reading, Typing, Cleaning, Cooking, Repeat

Handmade, homemade pizzas. They are a spiritual practice in themselves. I start with a clean kitchen, turn on the radio to a fun music station or my Pandora and choose Opera to get in the passionate mood of rolling dough and creating a meal delight that requires no fork. I light a candle and flour my board and into the mystic I go for a long time. Pizza’s take a while, the longest part is rolling out a dough that keeps wanting to shrink back to a small size. It needs time to relax and willingly expand itself.

Every pizza I make is different. I could never go into business because each time the flavors and textures are new. I love watching the Chef’s Table Pizza episodes while I do my work. Then we can eat this delicious pizza while watching other people make and eat pizza. That’s the best.

Here is a frugal tip. I bought a 4 lb block of cheese for $18. It was on sale and that is a huge deal. A good cheese is normal $8.99 for a lb. I made 9 pizzas and one pan of 12 vegetarian enchiladas with this cheese. Plus a few sandwiches. For $25 I could get one decent pizza at Papa Murphy’s. There’s a frugal tip for you on this wonderous Saturday. One block of cheese on sale fed us 5 or 6 dinners plus a couple lunches. That is why it saves so much to cook at home.

Now, let’s move on to writing and books. I just read 3 books in 3 days. A record for me, however, I did skim the heck out of one of the books because it bored me. I’m now onto heavier reads: The Once And Future King by T.H. White, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. I have quite the stack here but we are taking it two by two. I have two writing books to tackle; Shut Up And Write The Book by Jenna Moreci, she has a youtube channel and does lots of live writing sprints if you are interested. She is funny and no nonsense. Then I have Save The Cat! Writes A Novel by Jessica Brody. This got great reviews. Haven’t cracked one yet, but I’m no stranger to the writing craft books.

As for writing, I have two stories with two outlines finished. I’m not sure who I’ll go with first. I think I’ll enjoy my weekend, I’ve made a rule to not work on the weekends because that is what would happen if I was in the work force right? Clock in and clock out, take a weekend off. I would quickly resent a boss asking me to work on the weekends. I have family, I’d say. Shove it! I’d say. Probably I wouldn’t say that, but I would think that. I see people working their lives away, it’s sad. But us self employed people work around the clock without realizing it. We are home, after all, and it’s easy to mix writing work with house work and family work. It gets jumbled and goes on to infinite.

Starting April 1, Monday, we have Camp NaNoWriMo! This is not exactly like Novembers Nano where you are writing a whole novel of 50K words. This is camp Nano so you can work on anything: an edit, poem, script, novelette. I will start my novel on Monday and I’ve plugged in 50K words as the goal. I love NaNoWriMo, it is the best exercise for us writers, especially when in a slump or dead end in a novel. It forces you to just write like a crazy person without the criticism and ego interrupting every five minutes. You don’t have time for all that, you have to write fast and hard to get to the finish line. Result: success in finishing a book. It may be 90% crap, but so was Sylvester Stallone’s first draft of Rocky and look what happened with that. That is why it is a draft…an idea ready to be molded and reworked into a good story.

I do a lot of cleaning and cooking on the weekend. The house is full of the family and trapped by rain so everyone is crammed in here. I usually have the father take the kids somewhere fun for an hour and half so I can clean the whole house. Then it’s fresh and sparkly for the weekend. I spend the rest of the weekend in the kitchen making foods or you may find me in the tub loaded with hot water and bubbles, book de jour in hand (the dry hand, of course) or you may find me in my office writing a blog or doing a Chakra spread or sitting in what ever room my children are hanging out in and missing the days of George the Curious Monkey and PBS cartoon mornings. They grow up too fast. These first ten years are crazy because they change SO much in a year, every year. One minute they are little and fit on my lap and love dinosaurs and Godzilla and then they are sassy and moody tweens. Aaahhh, tweens, teens! You’re never prepared no matter how much your friends try to prepare you by telling old war stories of “When so and so was a teen, boy oh boy. I didn’t think I would make it!”

My kids are fun and affectionate, so it cushions the fact I’ve already lost control.

I’m making my honey, butter wheat bread and cooking up the one large pizza that survived unscathed and uneaten last night. I have chopped up all sorts of delicious, sweet fruit and it’s set out as a fruit buffet on the kitchen counter, the bread rising on the side board. I’m having my afternoon latte with two shots of espresso and will be starting on King Arthur between packing for my eldest who has a field trip out of town with the school. It’s the first time we will be separated for three days. We have never been separate. Exciting and sad stuff.

Everybody have a great weekend and Holiday. We do an alternative with Spring Welcoming Celebration. It’s feeling like eternal Winter over here, but I know that one day it will be sunny and warm and I will run out into the street that day and take us all on a long stroll to downtown and around the woodsy neighborhoods where other humans will be outside as well, re-enacting yard work and other behaviors one does when outside in good weather.