Would I get more done, do you suppose, if I concentrated on one project at a time, working on it until it was done, rather than continually coming up with new ones, which require me to stretch my time and energy further than it really is possible that it can go?
That's a rhetorical question.
Also a pointless question, since I can no more stop coming up with new and clever things to make/do than I can stop breathing.
Above is a project I've been working on for a while, the transformation of a wooden tool box that I got for Christmas long ago from that computer consulting place where I once worked. I'm wishful of turning it into a planter to hold a herb garden. But I can't just, you know, stick some herbs in it. I have to paint and decorate it and then cover it with some varnish so that it won't get too damaged by accidental water spills which all plant containers are subject to. I'll post more pictures when it's done. The herbs will be planted in the tea tins that I've been accumulating since I became a hardcore tea drinker -- Twinings makes cute little tea tins, but a person can only use so many of them.
The trouble is, many of my projects are complex and take considerably more than one sitting to accomplish.
I've been working on one of my projects this evening -- the learning to cook with gluten free flour project. After the two successes that I blogged about awhile ago, the bread and the oatmeal muffins, I had two resounding failures. (The trouble with failures when you're experimenting with cookery is that the results are generally inedible.) I tried making baking powder biscuits -- one of my perennial favorite recipes -- they turned out nice and fluffy, but tasting of chickpea flour. And chickpea flour has a disgusting taste. Then I tried making crackers, with the same result.
My theory as to why these two things didn't work when the first two items I made with the gluten free flour were perfectly edible is that the biscuits and the crackers didn't have any added sugar, whereas the bread & the muffins did. So as a test of that theory, I'm making banana bread with the GF flour. Banana bread has lots of sweetness from the bananas, and sugar in the recipe in addition.
I waste a lot of money on magazines. It's one of my vices, so when Novel was asking what to get me for my birthday I told him a couple of magazine subscriptions would be good. I didn't ask for a subscription to any home decorating mags, which is I suppose odd because they are one of my worst vices -- crack magazines, Novel calls them -- but then I rarely buy the same one twice running. Instead I opted for Threads and Mother Jones. (I also really wanted Yoga Journal, but then ended up not getting it, for reasons of economy, which was doubtless a mistake, as I shall probably buy issues piecemeal over the year.) Yesterday my Mother Jones mag finally came so I spent the day reading about right wing politics (and the politics of lying) and simultaneously being angered and saddened by the stuff I was reading, and seeing the parallels between the tactics used by the right wingers in the States and in Canada. We're a couple of steps behind them in certain things, but I'm sure that now that Harper has a majority he'll fix that.
Update: Turns out that banana bread made with gluten free flour and plenty of sugar is extremely edible.
Oh all the days
That I have run
I sought to lose that cloud that's blacking out the sun
My train will come
Some one day soon
And when it comes I'll ride it bound from night to noon
--Mike Doughty, Looking At The World From The Bottom of a Well