Errands and Messes

Posted on January 6, 2025 by Lori Finding Joy
  1. I had planned on making some baked stuffed french toast for New Year’s day breakfast, but life happened and I finally made it yesterday afternoon – and baked it off this morning. It wound up being delicious and it’s all I have eaten today. I am contemplating going to buy another loaf of brioche just to make more. I won’t, because it’s not the sort of thing one should eat every single day, but the temptation is real. (I used this recipe, adding fresh raspberries and not doing the crumb cake topping because it seemed unnecessary.)
  2. Still no goals or deep thoughts about the New Year. I started knitting a temperature blanket for 2025 – basically you knit one row every day in a color that represents a temperature range. So for example, yesterday the high was 28 degrees so I knit a row in purple, because I assigned purple to the range of 20-30 degrees. Mind you, it FEELS much colder, but for sake of ease I went with the daily high temperature. It just so happens that so far the blanket is mostly blue (30-40 degrees), so the 6-year old thinks it is for her because blue is her favorite color. I don’t have the heart to tell her that I give this project six weeks before I fall so far behind I can’t recover and it lands in the pile of unfinished things to languish for eternity. That said, I am considering using red yarn to represent the day of her adoption in case by some miracle I actually do finish it.
  3. Meanwhile, in the wash at the moment is a very nice wool blanket from Cuddledown because I took the 6 year old to the grocery store yesterday afternoon (after using up all the milk for the french toast) and when we returned, we discovered the 7 year old had been eating pickles on the couch and the 1-year old decided to help himself, and there was my husband trying to clean up pickle juice that had spilled on the blanket, the couch, the baby, and the living room floor. I’ve run wool items through the delicate cycle in the washing machine before and it’s turned out fine, but I’m not entirely sure how I am going to dry this. Normally I would dry it outside, but with the current temps being what they are it would just turn into one big rectangular icicle. But yeah, pickle juice all over everything was not on my bingo card yesterday.
  4. I think there was someone I went to high school with at the grocery store yesterday. That was also not on my bingo card. I’m pretty sure I caught them ducking into an aisle to avoid me which just seemed…unnecessary? I don’t know. A friend in college once said to me, “Lori, you think everyone hates you” and honestly, truer words were never spoken. (Anxiety disorder for the win!) And to be honest I did my own share of ducking, partly because I was too busy keeping the 6-year old from climbing into the refrigerator case of Lunchables and partly because I was pretty sure I had french toast batter all over me.
  5. I drove the kids to school/daycare this morning and amusingly discovered a Christmas gift that my husband had bought for me and misplaced, in the glovebox of his car. It’s a set of watercolor paints, which need to be hidden away before the kids get home lest they are destroyed, or a cat gets painted, or the baby eats them. Painting is like playing the guitar to me — I SO badly want to be able to do these things but I have zero talent, but keep plugging away anyway. Stupid F chord is my guitar block, and the inability to draw anything is my painting problem. I keep having to remind myself the joy is in the doing, not the end product, and also that I am (hopefully) setting an example to the girls that you don’t have to be good at everything (they are both perfectionists, in different ways, and get frustrated when they cannot immediately be good at things). Alas.

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About Lori Finding Joy

Native Mainer. Compulsive knitter. Occasional writer. Bird watcher, star gazer, window dreamer. Mom.
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