cake cake cake

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Friday Randomosity: Of Frazz and Birthdays

What are you doing this weekend? I don’t even KNOW what I’m doing. Or maybe I do? I think my mom and I have plans to maybe go shopping? And while we do that, my dad is going to examine this segment of siding that has decided it is a ruffle. And then maybe I will make dinner? My husband also said something about going to look at outdoor furniture??? Was that this weekend???

I feel so overwhelmed by life – all good things!! everything is good and happy and extremely stressful! – that I can literally only think about the step immediately ahead of me. Right now, that looks drinking some water (per Sarah) and making lunch and doing a tiny brain dump. 

  • This Is Just Mean: As you may have gleaned, I have been in such a state of frazz. SUCH A STATE. I keep doing this thing where my brain will smugly prank me and – this requires an example. I was sitting at Carla’s sports practice, scrolling through Twitter trying to work on my sorely neglected novel, when all of a sudden I saw a tweet that said, simply, “One word to describe Cancers” and my brain helpfully said “Your friend H is a Cancer.” And then my body went cold and my heart skipped because a) H is not a Cancer but b) her birthday was ten days ago did I even acknowledge it???? 

I did acknowledge it, both via text and in person, but it still took me several nearly-avoided-a-car-accident moments to recover from the horror of potentially forgetting a friend’s birthday. WHAT THE HELL, BRAIN? 

Especially what the hell because this has been happening all week. Little pinches in the back of the thigh that have been wildly (if momentarily) terrifying and – so far – completely unhelpful. I am doing the things, I guess, even if I am apparently not making a mental record of them having been done.

  • I’m A Lot Like You: My brain has also been doing that thing (HI NICOLE) where it hyperfocuses on one or two lines of a single song, and then blares those two lines ad infinitum into my skull in the middle of the night. (The song in question is El Scorcho, which I quite like as long as I don’t think too hard about the lyrics.) (The narrator is an entitled dick, is my view when I do think about the lyrics, which I have been a lot because they are always elbowing into my thoughts. A girl does not owe you her interest simply because you have a thing for her. Also, maybe don’t read girls’ diaries?)
  • Tiny Weezer Fan: Speaking of Weezer, if you also have a tiny Weezer fan in your household, I just ordered this T-shirt for Carla. It will be one of her birthday presents and I am so excited for her to open it. 
  • Rev-Up of the Birthday Sads: We are getting SO CLOSE to Carla’s tenth birthday. I am excited and happy because it is a joy to see her grow up, but I am also a little sad. On the way to camp this morning, I literally started crying in the car simply because I thought about one specific moment from her birth. She was born with the umbilical cord around her neck, and was whisked away to the NICU pretty immediately after she was born. I couldn’t move my legs because of the epidural, plus I was shaky and vomity after giving birth, so I remember shrieking at my husband that he needed to go with her. She was brand new! And now she was all alone! Don’t let her be alone!!!! Obviously everything turned out just fine, but the thought of that little new-to-the-world infant, wrenched from her warm cozy womb into a cacophony of unfamiliar blaring light and sound, and then instantly separated from the voices she was accustomed to… Oh my god, it just breaks my heart. Still. 
  • Shellacking the Sad with Other Anxiety! Yay!: So instead of thinking about and possibly dealing with my Feelings, I am masking the sadness with ridiculous worries that are not worries. My latest: Ten is a special age! Should I be doing Something Special? Like, especially special? We are having dinner at Carla’s favorite restaurant with all her grandparents, and then we’ll come home to eat cake (she now wants a vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream topped with raspberries, raspberry jam in between the layers, and a raspberry coulis on the side. “Simple,” she said.) (Maybe something like this? With vanilla instead of raspberry buttercream? Or this one, although it’s got cream cheese frosting instead of buttercream? Or this one, which sounds just right but has a few unusual ingredients that are making me squinty?) and open presents. Is there some sort of special You Are Ten type of gift I should be getting her? What is memorable about your tenth birthday? Or the tenth birthdays of people in your life? Can it just be a normal birthday or do I need to do something extra? And if “yes to extra,” what should that be??? Look at that. I am feeling less sad and more stressed as I type! 
  • Pool Hair Do Care: Let’s ABRUPTLY change subjects! Carla is doing a lot of swimming this summer and her hair is not loving it. She has fine hair. It’s light in color. It’s long (below her shoulders). And it’s wavy. This plus repeated chlorine exposure all adds up to hair that feels brittle and does not brush well. I bought some special shampoo and conditioner designed to help with chlorine removal, but either Carla isn’t using enough of it or it needs more time to work. I’ve tried forcing her to wear a swim cap, but a) I can’t police her at camp and b) she’s already lost one swim cap and the other is so tight it gives her headaches and c) it doesn’t seem like the swim caps are actually water tight anyway. I am NOT a swimmer so if you have any swim-related advice, hair specific or other, I would welcome it. 
  • Bloggy Book Club: I used the shampoo/conditioner purchase as an excuse to buy a copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I am eager to read as part of Engie’s bloggy book club in July. Are you joining us? I started reading it to Carla this week and her initial impression is that it is boring. I am not sure if she will have a secondary impression because she keeps rejecting my attempts to keep reading. We haven’t even made it through the first chapter! (I do not think it is boring. I think it’s fascinating.) It’s been more than a decade since I first read (listened to) this book, and I’m really excited to see if I love it as much on a second read as I did the first time.
  • Summer Skirt Success: I think I already mentioned this, but I went on a bit of a buying binge in May and got a bunch of cute dresses. This skirt was among them and I wore it for the first time this week and LOVED IT. It is super light, and so long it skims the tops of my feet. I wore it with this bodysuit, which I also surprisingly really like. It’s a nice thick material so that you can’t see a bra underneath it. Well, I didn’t wear, like, a bright purple bra under it or anything so YMMV, I guess. But it’s very soft and I like how smmoth-to-the-body it is compared to a T-shirt; I always feel frumpy when I try to pair a T-shirt with a skirt, but perhaps that’s user error.

All right, I think that’s all I have today. Thanks, as usual, for listening. While things are no less busy around here – and are about to get even busier and more full of change – at least my houseguests are gone and I have the house to myself once more. Laundry is laundrying, the dishwasher is running (somehow we used every single non-specialty drinking glass that I own), and I am starting to feel a teensy bit more normal. My head is still full of Weezer, though. How stupid is it? I can’t talk about it. I gotta sing about it and make a record of my heart.

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Things I’m Thinking About Thursday

This is the week my parents move to my state, which is extremely exciting. And yet everything – everything!!! – seems to be going wrong for them. I am so furious at the community to which they are moving, which in my opinion seems to have the viewpoint that their clients should feel LUCKY to be paying them money, and should not complain about things like borked timelines and shoddy workmanship and complete lack of transparency about EVERYTHING, because there are a bunch of people lined up and ready to take the abuse that my parents are objecting to. I really could go on and on about their experience, which has been a shitshow and I do not use that word lightly. But I can’t do anything about it, and nor can my parents who have already paid a lot of money for the privilege of being jerked around. My ONLY HOPE is that this moving-in nonsense is all the fault of the one seemingly incompetent person in charge of bringing new residents into the community, and that once my parents are finally settled they will find it to be a lovely place that doesn’t suck. 

Anyway, while my blood pressure surges with impotent rage, I thought I might type some things. 

It’s been a busy few weeks, and the next few weeks don’t seem to have a whole lot of let-up on the busyness front. But it’s very nearly all good busyness, so I’m trying to focus on that and not on the stressy feelings that I get from being so regularly busy.

Realtor Guilt: My husband and daughter and I continue to look for a new house, which is adding to the busyness because it seems like every week or two we have to drop everything to squeeze in a viewing. We are in the excellent position of not needing a new house; our house and neighborhood are wonderful. But we would all like a little more space. And that has become especially clear lately, because we have had one houseguest and will have two more in a couple of weeks and it’s sadly VERY possible that my parents may also need to stay with us instead of in their newly renovated home which was supposed to be done June 1. No, June 6. No, we really promise June 8. We have a guest room; we have two full bathrooms. This is more than many people have! It really shouldn’t be an issue to have a couple of houseguests, and yet it just feels cramped and crowded when we do. My daughter gives up her bathroom so the guests can use it, and uses our bathroom. And it’s fine, it really is, but it would also be SO NICE if we had a separate bathroom that guests could use. Plus I really, really, really want a mudroom. You know how there’s that saying that kitchens and bathrooms sell houses? In my case, a house could have the most gorgeously appointed gourmet kitchen but if it doesn’t have a proper mudroom I’m not buying. 

So we are looking for a house, but it has to be The Exact Right House for us to leave our perfectly wonderful existing home. And that means that we are being SO PICKY. Which leads to my realtor guilt. I love our realtor – she is a very brisk, efficient type of person who gets us in to see whatever we need. But I am a little worried that she secretly hates us. She never acts like it; she’s too much of a pro. But she takes us to see all these spectacular homes and then we find some little stupid thing to nitpick and I wonder if she thinks we are jerking her around. We AREN’T. We actually put an offer in on one of the first houses we had her show us, and she was so surprised that she kept saying, “I didn’t think you were that serious yet!” as we were scrambling to get pre-approved for the mortgage and find a lender and put together an offer on a Sunday night. 

This was several months ago now (and we still think about the house that got away), and we have seen probably close to 20 houses. The market is BONKERS. A house pops up on the MLS and then by the next day, it has five offers – all over asking. So if there’s any chance of getting the house we want, it feels like we have to act immediately. And our realtor is great about getting us in right away, even if that’s at night or on the weekend. I am aware that she chose this line of work, and that this is apparently what the job entails, and that at some point whatever commission she makes must make it worthwhile. But I feel SO GUILTY. 

Earlier this week, we saw a house at, like, eight in the evening. And it was GORGEOUS. The inside was perfection. The neighborhood was lovely. It had a beautiful pool and outdoor eating set up. And yet… the yard was small and not particularly private, and the lot was on a busy road and near the freeway so there was quite a lot of road noise outdoors. Plus, none of the doors seemed to want to stay open, which was odd. Like, you’d open the closet door and then it would slam closed of its own volition; the office had French doors and one was propped open with a door stop and if you opened the other door it closed by itself. THIS IS HOW PICKY WE ARE BEING. 

Anyway. I am just feeling so guilty. Not guilty enough to put an offer in on a house that we aren’t fully in love with, but guilty nonetheless. 

Skin Update: My face has been doing pretty well lately. I went to see the dermatologist and he prescribed me a) an antibiotic to take if I ever have a flare up again and b) a sulphur-based face wash. I haven’t tried the face wash yet. My dermatologist said that it smelled of sulphur while using it, but that the scent goes away once your face is dry. The pharmacist said this is a lie. The pharmacist’s wife, apparently, also has rosacea and so he has been able to give me both his professional opinion on the things I’ve tried as well as his personal experience. He says that the face wash smells revolting and that the smell lingers. “Your partner will be able to smell it,” he said, a look of revulsion on his face. How fun for all of us. 

Also on the topic of my skin, I am still not eating dairy… although I have been trying to add it back into my diet in dribs and drabs. A little half-and-half here or there… A couple of slices of pizza… A taco with a little cheese sprinkled on. I haven’t noticed any big skin differences, so I am going to keep at it. My acupuncturist says that goat and sheep milk have smaller proteins in it than cow’s milk, so I should start there. I didn’t have the heart to tell her about the pizza, with mozzarella that definitely came from a cow. I don’t really MISS dairy, except that I do like pizza and I do occasionally want some mozzarella or goat cheese in my salads. I do sometimes miss yogurt, and I guess maybe the next step is to try a smoothie with yogurt in it. 

Note: I have tried almond milk yogurt, which I do not like, and coconut milk yogurt, which is fine. (I cannot eat soy yogurt, so I haven’t tried it.) But I don’t like these non-dairy options enough for how many calories they have, so I’d rather skip yogurt entirely. Also, I tried almond milk sour cream and it was abominable. 

Summer Movie Watching: My daughter has a gap between the end of school and the beginning of camp, and I plan to spend our time together doing fun things like going for long walks at the dog park and watching movies. I have decided that as long as we are watching a movie together, it doesn’t count as Excess Screen Time. We have already watched Freaky Friday together, which I think went over pretty well, and Bend It Like Beckham which was both racier than I remembered and also kind of boring, and now I want all your mother-daughter movie recommendations. 

I have never seen Little Women, so that’s on my list… but I’m sort of afraid to ruin the book before Carla has a chance to read it. Maybe Thirteen Going On Thirty, which I am pretty sure we watched together several years ago; Carla has no memory of this. Another one we’ve watched together that she doesn’t remember is The Princess Bride, which I would be delighted to watch again. We watched The Labyrinth at some point in the past couple of years, but maybe that would be a good one to rewatch? I’m not as hip to more recent releases, although Carla and I did go to the theatre to see Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (it was just as well done as everyone assured me it would be). Carla loved it and wants to watch it again. 

All movies are fair game. Just please don’t suggest E.T. ; she has thankfully already seen it and that is my most-hated movie of all time, right up there with Space Camp and The NeverEnding Story. (My husband watched the latter with Carla fairly recently; I cannot get past the agonizing death of the horse.) 

I will say that my big bias against movies these days is content about sex and dating. For some reason, that’s what I find myself wanting to “shield” from Carla (although “shield” isn’t quite the right word), more so than anything else. Probably an impulse that requires more in-depth analysis, but I think on the face of it is that so many movies are so casual about sex and romantic relationships and tend to overelevate their importance. Like… Bend It Like Beckham has this whole side plot about the two soccer players both having the hots for their soccer coach. And… why? Why did that have to be a plot point? There was plenty of conflict already, between the protagonist and her parents, between her and her sister. If there had to be conflict between the two friends, why not make it about soccer? Or the protagonist’s refusal to be honest with her parents? And yes, I know that Bend It is also about how the main character’s culture plays up the importance of traditional values of femininity and marriage and wifeliness, but that was super clear without any sort of reference to shagging one’s soccer coach. (Or calling someone a bitch because she tried to kiss said soccer coach, after you specifically told her you didn’t like him!) And yet I am fine with The Princess Bride, I think? That’s a romance, and Buttercup doesn’t have a whole lot of agency if my memory is correct, but it seems different??? Maybe because the movie is an adventure, and yes, true love is the driving force and the reward, but the adventure is really what the movie IS, right? Am I remembering this correctly? 

I don’t know; like I said, I haven’t really examined this bias in any meaningful way yet. Carla is not yet ten. We’ve talked to her about the mechanics of sex and have bought her books that are frank about sex and try to be open about any and all things she’s curious about, so it’s not like sex is a big mystery. Plus, romance and love are wonderful, in fiction and in life, and make for thrilling, excruciating conflict in movies and books. But I guess I don’t love how important sex and dating are in so many movies, especially those from my youth. Maybe I am just hoping to stave off, for a few more years, that all-encompassing, dizzy, yearning feeling of boy craziness I felt from fifth grade straight through until I met my husband???

Calcium Update: Possibly you remember how I regularly freak out about Carla’s poor calcium intake? Well, we have resolved this by simply giving her Tums during the day. (This is what my father suggested a year ago and we have just now come around to it for reasons unknown.) It’s probably not ideal, and she’s probably not getting exactly as much as she needs, but it’s better than nothing. There was a blissful period of time when Carla was regularly eating yogurt. She wanted the yogurt lumps I made back when I was still eating dairy, but they ran out. So she decided to mix raspberry jam and mini chocolate chips into yogurt each morning for breakfast. Yes, I know; high in sugar. But also high in protein and calcium! She has sort of fizzed out on that fad though, but it was really nice while it lasted. 

Home Improvements Inch Forward: One of my aspirations for the past couple of years has been to get our house trim painted. And it is DONE. Well, sort of; the person who painted the trim around the garage somehow only painted the trim that faces the driveway; the trim on the sides is not painted. Looks like he sanded the sides and just… forgot them? The painter in charge assures me he will come back, and I really believe that he believes he will… but I think the nature of the jobs he takes on means that it might be a long while before he gets back to us. For instance, he was able to do the trim the same day I reached out to him because he had another job in my neighborhood and he was waiting on the go-ahead from a larger job. Sigh. I am also hoping to have him paint the front door, which is awful and peeling. In fact, I asked him to paint the door when I asked him to paint the trim and there was some sort of misunderstanding. Anyway I hope that he eventually finishes the job. We shall see. He did our deck last year and it still looks good, so I’m hopeful. 

Birthday Angst Redux: We have finally settled on a birthday party plan for Carla, at long last, and after many permutations. It looks NOTHING like what she requested originally, but she seems happy and excited. The theme for her friend party will be succulents, because why not. (Do not ask me how we got to succulents from wolves.) I am trying to gather the courage to call my awesome local plant store to see if they can source party-favor size succulents for the guests. This is an okay thing to ask, right? I mean, I can order them online from multiple places, but I would much rather support a local business. But maybe they won’t be able to do it? Or maybe they won’t be able to do it as inexpensively as the online options? What then? Do I just spell it out up front: I am looking to spent no more than $X on Y small succulents in small pots – is that something you can do?

Also, Carla still wants a wolf theme for her family party. She wants a wolf head cake, and she drew a very detailed picture of her expectation. And look, I know my strengths and abilities and there is no way I can do something like this. Maybe I should just make the cake she wants and buy this cute topper from Etsy and hope she loves it???? I know that I could possibly call a bakery and ask them to do it, but I don’t know of any local bakeries that do this kind of detailed project and my experience with (okay, just the one) local bakery makes me reluctant to put the whole thing in their hands. Also it’s probably too late now, since I’ve been dithering about this for weeks and her birthday is IMMINENT. Please tell me there is some super! easy! way to do a wolf head that I am overlooking. Maybe I could print out a wolf head silhouette and cut a sheet cake in the shape of it and… it’s going to look awful. 

All right. That’s all I’ve got for today.

What are you thinking about this Thursday?

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Five for Friday

Friday already, and looking down the barrel of another long weekend! So here are five topics I’ve been thinking about, beginning with MORE CAKE TALK!

A No-Cake Defense (TL/DR: This Is a Me Issue): I loved everyone’s comments on yesterday’s post about choosing my birthday dessert. One thing I additionally loved was how some readers took issue with my husband’s anti-cake stance. I just want to say: I love you. Thank you for defending my cakely honor. You are a treasure and a joy and I feel so cozy and loved. 

While not knowing his exact reasons for not wanting to bake a cake, I can speculate. And so I do want to defend my husband a teeny bit. You do not have to accept these reasons! You can still glare in his general direction! 

If I am understanding correctly, his first objection is the time. He fears it will take all day to bake a cake, and he doesn’t want to waste a big chunk of my birthday in the kitchen, when we could be doing something else. While perhaps baking a cake should not take several hours, it does always seem to work out that way. At least, it does for me. But then again, I always end up making some silly mistake that requires me remaking some aspect of the recipe.

Also, and this may be projecting, but he might be a little nervous about making a cake. He is not the cake baker in the family; I am. And I am in no way a good role model for The Ease of Cake Baking, in large part because I am always doing something that makes the whole process more difficult (cough cough leopard spots, cough cough rainbow layers). But my husband has never made a cake. I have no doubt he COULD make a cake (he is generally a better direction follower than I am), but for your first cake to be the Replacement Cake for your wife’s birthday, after her previous birthday cake was such a disappointing experience… well. That seems like a recipe (see what I did there) for failure.

However, these perfectly reasonable reasons aside, after I read the umpteenth comment suggesting that maybe my husband should just suck it up and make me the cake I want (I am paraphrasing; everyone reading this is much more tactful), I started to agree. If he has volunteered to make me a birthday dessert, why shouldn’t I ask for the dessert I really want? And I am sure that if I said, “honey, this is what I REALLY want,” he might grumble a bit, but he would make it for me.

So I spent some time looking online for The Perfect Cake Recipe to send him.  But the process looking for a recipe to send him made me realize that there is a secret third reason he may be unwilling to make me a cake.

As you may already know, from reading all my food and cake related posts, lo these many years, I am one of those annoying people who doesn’t necessarily stick to a recipe. I might pair a cake from one recipe with a frosting from another recipe. Or I might make a smaller cake than the recipe recommended. Or I might take a cupcake recipe and turn it into a cake. Or I might choose a recipe that calls for poppy seeds in the icing, but I would exclude the poppy seeds. I am comfortable with this, both because I now have some experience in messing around with recipes and because I am comfortable with the idea that it might not turn out. My husband is NOT comfortable with either of these things. He doesn’t have the cake baking experience to draw on, for one thing. But he is also a Supreme Instruction Follower and would find it blasphemous to deviate from a recipe’s explicit directions. 

And the thing is, when I search for My Perfect Cake… I can’t find it. It doesn’t exist. Okay, it DOES exist, and Kate found it (thank you!) but it is too large and too expensive for just the three of us. BUT, it’s very nice to know it’s there, if I need it! What I’m saying is the recipe for My Perfect Cake doesn’t exist. There is this perfectly lovely sounding cake, but it calls for lemon extract and I am a lemon purist. But I can’t ask my husband to just… exclude the extract. I mean, you probably can’t just DO that anyway, you’d need to track down other lemon cake recipes and compare various amounts of lemon juice and lemon zest and choose an amount that seems appropriately lemony for this specific cake. I can imagine how overwhelming it would feel if I suggested my husband do that. Even if I did the research, and wrote on top of the recipe, “omit lemon extract; use X tbsp of lemon juice,” he would feel worried that it wouldn’t turn out, and that if it didn’t, it would be HIS fault. 

This recipe looks very close to my ideal… but there are so few reviews, and of the reviewers who seem to have actually tried the recipe, it sounds like the cake comes out too dense for what I would prefer. 

I do love Sally’s Baking Addiction, and this recipe sounds similar to what I’m looking for and I trust her recipes, although sometimes the cake is a bit more dense than I prefer. But… there’s no lemon curd in this recipe. I want lemon curd. But I don’t think I could just say, “spread some lemon curd in between the layers” to my husband without him feeling like he needed additional, very specific directions to follow. (I actually used this recipe to make my daughter’s seventh birthday cake, and did put lemon curd between the layers.)

Are you beginning to understand that this is not really a problem with my husband trying to deny me the cake of my heart? That it is, instead, an issue of me being too picky?

Like I said, feel free to continue to feel irritated with my husband. But perhaps you can also spare some irritation for me, as well. I am hard to please. 

***UPDATE***: I wrote all of the above last night, before my husband got home from work. After sending him the link to Kate’s cake, and deciding that it was really too expensive, and explaining to him that I have been thinking about this particular cake for more than a year, I thought we finally settled on him making me cupcakes. That would be great! Lemon curd filled cupcakes. I explained how to do the filling part, and my husband listened attentively and asked if I would object to him putting pink food coloring in the frosting which strikes me as very adorable. And then thirty or so minutes later, cake clearly on the brain, my husband asked me, “Should I just make you the cake you want?” and I said, “but I thought making a cake was too much?” and he said, “but if I’m going to make cupcakes, I might as well make a cake,” and I said, “yes, please.” And then there was some discussion about my favorite cream cheese frosting and whether I would be amenable to him adding some lemon zest to the frosting (yes) and whether I need homemade curd (no). So I think it is happening????? If there is cake in the offing, I will certainly share all the details with you. (Although cupcakes would also be excellent.)

Surely This Is Not Right: I went to the dentist and noticed this poster hanging prominently on the wall. I do not object to the sentiment, which is lovely. But it raises the question: how do you pronounce “hygienist”? 

After spending far too much time listening to online pronunciations of the word, I believe that in British English, the pronunciation is “hy-JEEN-ist.” But in American English, it’s “hy-JEN-ist,” is it not? 

In no way is the first syllable “hahy.” Not that I would even know how to pronounce “hahy.” Hah-hee? Hah-high? (My husband thinks this is a way of representing the diphthong of “hy,” but I think there are better ways to represent it than “hahy.”

I suppose this could be one of those words that you have only ever experienced in print and have not yet heard aloud, and when you do finally hear it spoken, the pronunciation is a shock. (Do you have a word like this? Mine is ravine.) But I don’t think that this is one of those cases. 

Okay, I still apparently have more to say about this. If you were the person buying wall art for a dental office, a dental office in the United States specifically, wouldn’t you be uniquely aware of the correct pronunciation of dental terms? And wouldn’t you find this EXTREMELY ODD?

Freelance Does Not Mean Free: One of the most… shall we say interesting aspects of freelancing is the money aspect. Some clients are very on top of it, saying things from the get go like, “This is our budget,” or “We typically pay this for this type of project.” Other clients seemingly would never raise the topic if I didn’t broach it first. When it comes to invoicing, some clients are very clear to say, “This looks good, send me your invoice” while others drag out projects for months and would probably never even consider that I should be paid for work completed until I finally say something like, “Great, I’ve included an invoice.” (And I realize that I have a unique privilege of allowing projects to sometimes drag on without pay – and do so only with clients I have had for years and whom I know will pay eventually; it’s not something I would advocate when you are just starting out. And also, for big projects, it is important to ask for a portion [I do half] up front before you begin.) It’s just so fascinating to me that some clients seem completely oblivious to the fact that the work a freelancer does has a price tag.

Aspirations Mini-Update: I have been working toward all my aspirations. Well maybe not all, but many. (I have made progress on all but one of my Personal/Self Improvement aspirations, for instance.) One thing I did was start a very simplistic Excel spreadsheet where I could track the things I wanted to do regularly, if not necessarily daily. Playing the piano and writing and exercising and walking outside. That kind of thing. And what I have noticed is that I cannot do every single thing I want to do daily in a single day. There are just not enough hours in the day. I mean, I suppose I could break up my day in such a way that I could get to everything… but that seems overly rigid and also, to be honest, exhausting. There needs to be some flexibility. For one thing, if I walk outside for 30 minutes then it seems like overkill to also walk on the treadmill. For another thing, if I am really on a roll with, say, writing, I don’t want to STOP just because it’s time to play the piano for fifteen minutes, you know? So I am still trying to feel my way through what is a reasonable way to achieve these goals without achieving them simply for the sake of putting a check mark in my spreadsheet. Perhaps I do need to find a way to create some sort of a schedule, though. 

Unusual Snack Foods: One of my all-time favorite snacks is a half a green bell pepper filled with cottage cheese and sprinkled with Lawry’s Seasoned Salt. (We called it “carrot salt” when I was growing up, probably because my mother also sprinkled it on carrots.) (Carrots are also delicious dipped in carrot-salted cottage cheese.) 

Neither my husband nor my daughter would touch this snack with a ten-foot pole, but it is delicious and crunchy and full of protein and SO GOOD. I cannot be the only person in the universe (besides my mother) who enjoys it. Have you ever tried this amazing combo? If not, would you be willing to try it? (You won’t hurt my feelings if you say no; I am still very iffy on the chicken thighs situation, so I fully understand New Food Resistance.)

Are there unusual combinations of foods that you like to snack on? 

That’s all I have for you today, Internet! I hope you have a fabulous weekend full of cake and weird snacks and reasonable pronunciations!