After several months away from it, I’ve finally picked the book back up and have started a new round of edits. Late last year I got to the point where I just had to stop fiddling with it. I was having no new ideas, and progress was frustrating and slow. But now that I’ve had some time away, I feel I can look at it with fresh eyes, and I’m so excited to be back to work on it. In fact, on the first read-through, I’ve already rearranged some chapters and started hacking away and identifying places where I’d like to add some things. Not any major, life-changing edits, but enough substantial ones to get me excited again.
It is very easy for me to get wrapped up in jobs that have paychecks attached to them. I tend to over-commit mentally and emotionally and time..ly? Time-wise? You know what I’m saying. Anyway, for the past few weeks I’ve been focused so much on my paycheck-jobs that I haven’t been focusing on the book. I have managed to keep the house clean and the food cooked (more on this in a second), and I’ve finished reading a few books, but I haven’t touched anything having to do with coal or any other large-scale writing project. Now, I’m re-prioritizing and remembering and recapturing the excitement I had toward my book. I’m still invested in my “real job” of course, but not to the exclusion of what I’m really passionate about.
As for food, my motivation for MD Take Two is tanking in a major way. I don’t know what it is. I’m feeling great, I’ve got plenty of energy, I’m happy with the food choices I’ve been making. But I have no desire whatsoever to continue with the “forty day” program. I guess because I’ve done it before and feel I’ve paid my penance by going through the first phase again. I don’t know. I just want the flexibility and freedom of being at the end of it, at allowing for “exceptions” (which I’ve been allowing for, here and there, because otherwise I’d ditch the effort altogether). I don’t regret beginning again. I’m just re-thinking my commitment to going the whole six weeks in the prescribed way. Maybe I’ll skip the second phase. Maybe I’ll get re-motivated when I get to the next phase. I don’t know. What I do know is that I would do just about anything for some bread right now.
I’ve been roasting a chicken on weekends and making chicken stock and then chicken soup, and that’s been quite tasty. Other high points of the diet have been the roasted leg of lamb we shared with some friends last week, the goat-cheese-spicy-mustard salmon that used to be a mainstay of our normal diet, and Halloumi, which we recently discovered. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a sheep’s milk cheese (at least the version in our Harris Teeter is) that doesn’t melt when heated. So, you can pan fry it and it gets nice and crispy and tasty. I recommend using a cast-iron skillet. Make sure you eat it hot, though, because as soon as it starts to cool it gets a rubbery texture. I usually fry up two pieces and eat one while the other waits in the hot pan off the heat. Another treat I’ve been enjoying is “Really Raw Honey,” an unprocessed, unheated honey with the consistency of creamy peanut butter. Rachael P. got us hooked on this–she dips almonds in it, and it’s heavenly.
And, because I promised and still have not delivered, a few Christmas pictures. My grandmother (my mom’s mother, who lives in Florida half the year and in WV the other half) gave me her pig teapot after I admired it. She didn’t want it, she said, because it didn’t whistle. I told her pigs don’t whistle. Now if they come up with a teapot that oinks when the water boils, that will really be something.
Here’s my in-laws’ impressive collection of holiday creatures:
And here is Mom making a funny face for the camera. I can post things like this on the Internet because I’m the only person she has given birth to, so she has to love me.
