Crispy Around the Edges

I haven't posted for 3 days. For some people, that's par for the course. For me, it's quite a long absence. It's not that I have nothing to say nor that I have no time necessarily to say it, it's just that I'm just a little burnt out from various tasks and find it hard to collect my thoughts and get them to flow into post form. I think that's okay though. I really believe that posting less often may be better than posting too much anyway.

Before the weather changed, I had a lot of tasks in mind that I wanted to do once it snapped off from oppressively warm and muggy to crisp and cool. Now that that has actually happened, I'm getting to those tasks. Mainly, they include repairs and little home improvement projects that I'd get too sweaty doing in the summer, but also there is a lot of cooking I avoid in the summer. In particular, there are dishes that require use of the oven. Being in the kitchen at all in summer is hard enough without super heating the kitchen to levels that would melt butter to a liquid state just by leaving it on the counter.

Pale bits of dough full of lively and happy yeast about to fry to death in the oven. Oh, the humanity!

Yesterday, I squeezed in some cinnamon roll making between lessons. This is a recipe that I wrote about in my former blog which I make as a very rare treat for my husband. I'm happy to say the freezer is now full of pumpkin cake, brownies, and cinnamon rolls so I won't be baking again for awhile.

Iced rolls... the glaze looks vaguely pornographic in nature. Prudish types and diabetics may want to avert their eyes.

Besides the cooking and household odds and ends, I've been doing 3 or 4 lessons a week with the same student on top of the regular students. She's taking a sociology course and the lessons with her are essentially tutoring sessions. When she writes a paper, I'm essentially writing a paper. When she takes a class, I'm taking the same class with her. It's a bit of a brain drain really as I have to skim the book quickly, organize the contents at light speed in my mind, then spit it all back out for her to record the lecture and use it to go home and write up essays from. It's like mental calisthenics. I enjoy it, mind you, because it's much more stimulating and challenging than practicing verb tenses or prepositions, but it is a bit intense.

Anyway, this is just a brief verbal nod and a wave, and a reminder to myself about why I skipped several days at this point in my personal history.