Tag: thoughts

I’m Ready for March to be Over

March was more than I was ready for. It wasn’t bad, exactly, there were just a lot more things coming at me than I was prepared for. This past week turned out especially chaotic, with unexpected changes coming at me from several directions at once. Still, amid the turmoil there were bright spots.

This morning was a perfect spring day for walking the dog. Perfect temperature, trees in bloom, birds chirping daintily. Spring tends to be a volatile season, both in terms of literal weather changes and in the more abstract and mystical sense of shaking up your life, but it also has these moments of exquisite gentle beauty. Walking the dog has pushed me to really tune in to the waking up of my neighborhood’s flora and fauna.

I also bought a book subscription this week. I don’t use social media much anymore so the ads and suggestions the algorithms show me are usually pretty random. (Sometimes hilariously so; I looked up western shirts a couple weeks ago and now the internet thinks I’m a cowboy.) But every once in a while the suggestions are scary perfect. I’ve been using Instagram a bit recently, following a few yarn brands, knitters, and indie bookstores. From that tiny bit of info, Instagram decided I’d like the Morbidly Curious Book Club. Once a month they discuss a non-fiction book with a dark theme, and you can arrange for them to send you said book in the mail. Tragically, it’s too late in the month to be sent the March selection (if I want to read Whack Job: the History of Ax Murder, and I do, I’ll have to trek down to Barnes and Noble my damn self) but I’ll be receiving and reading the April selection with glee.

I have a comfortably large stack of horror and mystery novels to read for Darker Books, the blog I do with my sister, but my regular stack of non-blog books is quite low.

Only two books left! Whatever shall I do?

The antique umbrella stand housing my book stack also needs some work, but that’s a different problem for a different day.

And now for something completely different and a little more witchy. A few years ago I discovered Lenormand cards and decided to try them out. I read a few booklets and websites and played around with them but it never really went anywhere. I tucked my Lenormand deck into a box and went back to Tarot. A few weeks ago, in a bit of a spiritual rut, I decided to get more serious about the whole cartomancy thing. I brought out my Biddy Tarot guide so I could learn more about Tarot’s reversed meanings and I took another stab at Lenormand.

At the exact same moment I was also screwing around with the popular AI apps so I asked them to help me learn Lenormand. In spite of the fact that Claude has the personality of blank paper and ChatGPT sounds like a Mormon Mommy Blogger, they’ve been incredibly helpful with the whole Lenormand thing. My chat thread keeps track of my daily card pulls and my summaries of how they showed up in the events of that day, helping me relate them to each other and to the focus I set for the moon cycle. I alternate between a single Tarot card pull one day and a Lenormand pair the next so I can compare and contrast the two card systems, and since I have a few good Tarot books I can check the chatbot’s answers with human experts.

It’s gotten me out of that spiritual rut. I’ve been looking for ways to integrate my spiritual practices into my daily life in a deeper way and this has really opened up my thinking around that.

This is the Fairytale Lenormand and the Steampunk Tarot. Both are quite lovely.

I also made progress on my knitting project but it still mostly looks like a giant swatch so I haven’t taken new pictures. It might look like something wearable by next Sunday. We’ll see. Until next time, I hope your spring is shaping up to be just as beautiful and a bit less volatile than mine.

Trad Schmad: the Bread Dilemma

Look at those sweet sweet loaves of bread! (And that plate of fluffy naan!) I made those! Yeah, I finally learned to bake bread. I’m clearly not turning out golden Instagram loaves or anything but everything I’ve made so far tasted good and was reasonably crusty on the outside and soft on the inside. Success!

Honestly, I started this post weeks ago. That bread is long gone and a new loaft is in the oven right now. I’ve been struggling with this stupid post, writing and rewriting it and just feeling weird and I finally realized why.

It’s the Tradwives’ fault. They’ve made baking weird and fetishy. I mean, I sort of am a tradwife on paper, that’s probably why this gets to me. for various uninteresting reasons I was a stay-at-home mom in a fairly traditional straight person marriage. I was thinking about going back to work when the Pandemic hit, then we moved, then various other reasons kept coming up that made at-home parenting the best option. Now my last kid is sixteen and I could totally go back to college or get a job or whatever, but we’re financially lucky enough that I don’t really need to. If parenting was my career, I’m semi-retired and loving the freedom. This was just how things turned out. It wasn’t everything I wanted out of life but it had its up sides.

But now I feel like my job title has been turned into something political and vaguely gross by cute young influencers. Honestly, I’m not totally surprised. I was at-home parenting in Utah during the rise of the Mommy Bloggers and this seems like the logical progression of that weirdness.

If I’d learned to make bread during the Pandemic like everyone else, this wouldn’t be a problem. Back then, bread was having a moment. Unfortunately, back then I was too busy tradwifing my way through the crisis with three young kids suddenly doing online school to learn the art of sourdough. Now that I actually have time for this stuff I feel like I should either be baking in a pristine white kitchen (while wearing a prim little dress, prattling on about submission to my manly man). Or making a stand by only making vegan freegan punk rock bread that somehow smashes the patriarchy? You know, something dramatic to suit the present political climate.

I really just want to cook without all the fanfare, though. And I want to show it off a bit because I always thought bread from scratch would be harder to make than it is. I only learned because the grocery store raised the price of its fancy loaves yet again and I wanted to save money.

Bread is political now but here I am without a manifesto prepared. Ironically, my mom was actually a conservative at-home religious type and she totally refused to make bread from scratch. If Jesus wanted her to cook meals from scratch He wouldn’t have invented Hamburger Helper. My husband’s mom (also a conservative at-home religious type) cooked bread from scratch but when he reached his teenage years and started eating enough for five people, she made him learn how to bake it. When we were dating I would cook him dinner and he would bake me bread from scratch. So much for the bread-baking housewives of yesteryear.

So yeah, I let politics get in my head and stop me from sharing the cool thing I can do now. But no more! I want to live a quiet life and use my newfound free time to make tasty food. I totally have politics and lordy, things are getting more urgent than ever, but it’s important to carve out some quiet space to feel happy and proud of yourself and in control of at least one small thing.

Today, that one small thing is a loaf of Italian bread like this guy’s grandma used to make. Looks like I burned it a little bit but I’m gonna eat it anyway.

If you’re interested in recipes, the naan is from a Rasa Malaysia recipe. It’s pretty quick and easy to make. The other two loaves are from a fancy cook book called The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. I actually got it for my husband years back; it’s very thorough but also very geared toward the hardcore bread nerd. The recipes are super solid, though.