An Off Day

I had what you might call an "off day" yesterday.  It started at 5:20 in morning when Wes awoke me by crying and crying. (Granted, 5:20 is much better than this morning, when his cries began at 4 am.  What is going on?!?) Since I was up and at 'em so early I decided how lovely of me it would be to make cinnamon rolls for everyone's breakfast.  I put the ingredients in the bread machine and returned to watching PBS World (one of my favorite stations as it never has "special pledge-drive programming" of continuous lecturers talking about "The Ultimate Mind Body Solution" or endless incarnations of Celtic Thunder and Celtic Woman).  Anyway...the bread machine beeped and I looked at that dough and thought to myself "Did I remember to add the yeast to this?  Cause it looks kind of...not yeasty".  And then I thought "Should I carry on?  Or should I just call it quits now in case there is no yeast?"  And then I thought "Ah, I'll just make them anyway.  Butter, cinnamon and sugar would be good covering just about any type of dough, right? Unleavened cinnamon rolls will still be good."  So, I proceeded to roll them out, spread the dough with butter, sprinkle on the sugar, and then went to grab the cinnamon. Started shaking it on the dough and I thought "This cinnamon seems unusual.  What is wrong with this cinnamon?  Should I stop shaking it on? Nah, not yet." Finally it's strangeness couldn't be ignored so I stopped shaking it on and took a moment to examine the jar, whereupon I discovered that it was not a jar of cinnamon at all, but rather an identical jar filled with Chili Powder.  Made half-hearted attempt to scrape topping off of dough but chili powder merely became melded more completely to dough surface, so abandoned hope and threw the whole blob away.  Kitchen trash can did not smell like a brewery for the rest of the day so can only assume that I did in fact neglect to put the yeast in after all. So I guess my take away from this experience should be that if I think I left the yeast out of something, STOP rather than persevere only to waste a good half a cup of butter on it later.  I was really sad about that butter.  I mean, are cows living on petroleum products or something?  Why does a pound of butter cost as much as a gallon of gas?  It pained me to throw it away...but I just really could not think of any use for the butter, sugar and chili powder paste I had inadvertently created.  If you can think of something just keep it to yourself because #1- I don't need to feel worse about the debacle that was yesterday morning and #2- I never plan to make that mistake again and therefor do not need to take up valuable brain space with that information.  Thank you.

Motivation...can't Google it.

I know the internet can be the source of great motivation for many people...it can give you ideas for craft projects, recipes, exercise routines, oh my!  The thing is, this does the opposite of motivate me.  It is a motivation stealer.  I look at all of those pictures of homemade fabric flower headbands and I think "Cute!  I could make one of those." and then I read the accompanying text which is always something like, "Yesterday I made 32 of these in assorted colors for my daughter and my 5 nieces and all the Activity Day girls at church!" and I just say to myself "Oh...no."  No matter what you think you are good at, there is always someone on the internet doing it better than you, more often than you, or making way more money off of it than you.  It's a downer.

Also, what is it with photography these days?  Doesn't it seem like a very large segment of the population are now photographers?  There are a lot of very nice pictures being taken, but again, seeing all of these perfectly shot and perfectly edited photos of children and projects and families walking down a country lane in the fall or in front of a giant Ferris wheel with a two year old in a sports coat and the mom in 6 inch heels just makes me want to take the batteries out of my digital camera and put them in the Wii remote to turn on Netflix and watch all of the items showing under the recommendations for "Understated Bristish Movies with A Strong Female Lead".

I've seen the saying that "Comparison is the thief of joy".  Comparison is also the thief of motivation. And so I haven't made my girls fabric hair flowers since Lily's fourth birthday, and we haven't had a family picture taken since Amelia was 6 months old.  I have however watched all episodes of Downton Abbey, and North and South, reread Pride and Prejudice, and anxiously await the airing of Sherlock:Season 2 on PBS.