Last Tuesday I had some fairly minor foot surgery and have been limping around in a surgical shoe ever since. For vast stretches of time I’ve been lying on the couch with my foot elevated on a stack of pillows, a position that makes it very difficult to type. (That’s my excuse, anyway. When my son was going through his cancer and experiencing terrible back pain, he wrote all of his end-of-semester papers while lying back in a recliner and balancing a small laptop on his knees. If he could do that, surely I can type while on the couch!)
So what did I do? Well, I spent a vast amount of time watching cooking videos on YouTube. What’s been really amazing to me is how easy it is to get sucked down the rabbit hole of similar content, all guided by YT’s genius sidebars. You watch one video on a specific subject, and now you have tons more to watch on the same subject. I knew this marketing strategy well and have seen it at work in my life before, but I’ve never spent such an extended period of time letting myself just take it all in, drooling. (Well, drooling metaphorically.) Here’s a rough throughline of how I’ve gotten to know a whole host of cooking people I didn’t even know existed, starting from well before the surgery, showing how researching just one recipe can lead you far astray:
I’ve already talked about the human taste for drama, a characteristic that draws us into all sorts of extravagant and unsustainable announcements and commitments. The inherent weakness of drama as a long-term tool for change is this:
Really, folks, I don’t spent every waking minute reading blogs and immersing myself in the wonderful world of podcasts. I do have to remind myself, though, just as I used to remind myself about my book-reading habits, that sometimes taking in all this material from other people means that I’m not participating as fully as I might in my own life. That being said, I’ve greatly enjoyed getting into this whole new way to access a very old type of information, that of the spoken word. Instead of my just having the radio on to Colorado Public Radio and being forced to listen to whatever they’re droning on about, I get to choose my material to keep me company while I’m walking or cooking or cleaning.
I wrote last week that I had signed up for the 
As you know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, one of the bloggers/podcasters I follow is a woman named 
I define “downtime” as time that isn’t directed to a specific task or end but is what I do when I take a break from my work. Usually I read something, these days from some news website or the other. Oh for the days when I just read books! That type of thing seems like a distant memory. I used to gobble up murder mysteries by the ton, and when I’d be eating lunch by myself at home and reading I’d keep on eating so that I could keep on reading. (This former habit may help explain why I used to weigh more than I do now.)
My current Big Writing Project (BWP) is the finishing up of my commentaries on Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana for publication. I’ve been using the writing software Scrivener, as everybody who’s anybody says it’s magnificent. Well, I’d been finding it magnificently hard to use, to be honest. The final step in my project was the addition of images, and Scrivener just wasn’t cooperating. Until, suddenly, it was. I’m not sure what I did, but I think I had somehow created a table where I didn’t want one, and Scrivener was stubbornly following the
If I were to tell you about all the missteps we’ve had in our very simple renovation/remodel, this would be a very long post. Something seems to go wrong at every step of the way, whether it’s a mistake we make or one that a contractor makes. But we’re soldiering on. Today we finally get a working kitchen, as the (seemingly very competent) plumber is hooking up the faucet, garbage disposal and dishwasher. The countertops came in on Monday, and even though they didn’t give us as much