The big rocks, Part I

I keep starting posts but not having time to finish them. My goal is to write a little on the blog every day, even if it doesn't result in something actually being posted every day. I'll just keep plugging away and hopefully more things will get posted soon.

Years ago, back before we had kids or were even married, when my husband, Dr. J, and I lived in temperate Northern California, we thought we were busy. Once you have kids, you just shake your head and laugh because you thought you had no time before. Hahaha! Anyway, we both read a book by Stephen Covey et al. called First Things First. In it, Covey suggests identifying what is important in your life and identifying specific goals and activities related to these important things. The idea is that these important activities are often of a non-urgent nature, so they are always getting pushed aside by urgent-but-not-really-important things. For example, you would like to take your kid to the zoo, which is important because spending time with your kid is important to you, but since it's not urgent,* you keep putting it off so you can deal with other, non-important tasks that are urgent. You may even feel, as I would, that SOON, I will catch up on all these little tasks, and THEN I will have all the time in the world to spend some real quality time with my kid. Exercise could be another example. You feel it's important, but it CAN be put off for a day. But if you put it off for one day every day, it never happens.

The idea that you should identify what is important and do those things before all the little things on the list are done? That's golden. I have talked about that before on here and elsewhere, but not in a Covey way. 

So what you do instead, Mr. Covey says, is when you are scheduling your week, you put in these important-but-not-urgent activities into your schedule first, and then squeeze in the little things around them. Because once your schedule is full of little things, you can't fit in the big ones. His analogy is filling a jar with rocks and sand: if you put in the sand first, then the little rocks, the big ones don't fit, but if you put in the big rocks first, all the little stuff will fit in around them. Here's a YouTube video demonstrating this with actual rocks and sand. There are a million videos of it, but this one was short, if not very neatly done.

Gotta move on to another big rock. I'll continue this soon, I hope...

*unless you have this guilt-inducing song running through your head all the time, as I often do

Boule-y boule-y

Challenge Update: I took this picture the other day and now can't remember what I was going to say about it. But I am still baking bread! And tomorrow is the middle of the month! The Challenge is not as challenging as I was afraid it would be. It is just the right amount of challenge. The challenge really has been having a chance to blog about it or anything else. 

The computer is back with a new hard drive, but the challenge with that is that we upgraded the OS, and so it also has a new personality to go with its new brain, and so everything I try to do (merge mailing labels for a school mailing, sync the phone, etc.) takes about 50 times longer than I think it should. 

Seems like pictures on other people's blogs always look better than this one that I took with my phone. Oh, well. At least you can see that's it's bread. 

Giving

So as I think I said before, baking bread everyday has turned out to be the easy part. The hard part is the giving away. I now realize that I'm always afraid that even something intended as a kind gesture will be seen as intrusive or inappropriate.

I have had to fight my tendency to scuttle up to my target, ashamedly hand them a loaf of bread while muttering something about having extra bread, and running off. Not exactly in line with my intention of making friends, strengthening ties, and learning about Syracuse. For example, my idea for bringing bread to the Ronald McDonald House came from friends who had brought strawberries there once after picking more than they could eat themselves. But I don't know anything about the RMH AT ALL, other than that it seems like the parents staying there might need all the homebaked bread and freshly picked strawberries they can get. The lady at the Ronald McDonald House seemed very happy to receive the bread, but my husband and I are both surprised that a place like that, which I assume is run by a large organization with lawyers, etc., would accept bread from a stranger showing up at the door. I mean, what if I had poisoned it, and then a guest there ate some! I can't imagine why anyone would do that to people staying at the RMH, but corporations don't like to take chances. But did I ask, while I was there, if they could accept these kinds of donations and if it was actually something they encouraged so I would know next time I wanted to bring them something? I did not.

I have decided that "I made you some bread" is probably a better opening, even if I feel that it's not strictly true since I usually don't know who is going to get it when I'm making it. I'm not really telling people about my Challenge or the blog; not taking pictures of people I'm giving bread to. Just keeping track every day of what kind I make and who gets it.

In another post I'll list who's been given bread as well as my recipe, because it's wicked easy, and you should totally try it.

Ronald McDonald House

I just brought a loaf of bread to the Ronald McDonald House! This was my first loaf delivered to strangers. I was scared, but they didn't look at me crosseyed or call the police. They thanked me heartily and cheerfully. And I went on my way, feeling heartened and cheerful myself.

FBC update and Intro to Treats

It is now Feburary 6, and I have so far made bread every day of February. Every day but yesterday, I have given a loaf away. Yesterday we had friends over and ate most of a loaf together, so I'm counting that.

Here are my thoughts so far:

• baking bread every day has not really been a hassle because I am doing it in a very stripped down way most days
• so far, I have not made any new friends by giving away bread
• since I often vary the variables (kinds of flour; amount of yeast, etc.) if I make one loaf in a day and give it away, I have no way to be certain if it's cooked through, if it's not as dense as a brick, etc.
• people seem very pleased to be given a fresh loaf of bread, even if you tell them you're not sure how it is because it comes out a little different every time: the pediatrician was so touched gave me a big hug
• I can overthink ANYTHING

Last winter when I first started making bread, fresh bread warm from the oven with plenty of butter was such a treat, that we would eat a bunch of it every time I made it. That, it turns out, is a really good way to get fat. Eventually, since I wasn't making every day, I got into the mindset that it would be good if we didn't run out of it right away, and so we got into the mindset of saving the bread, but not too long, because bread with no fat in it doesn't stay fresh forever. So it became a little bit of a rationing and controlling mindset about the bread. Not that I was denying anyone bread, but my approach changed from  "gobble it up (and get fat)" to "save it (and end up eating some pretty stale bread)."

I realized this the first couple of days of this month when I made 2 loaves each day, so we would have one to eat and one to give away. Knowing that there would be more bread the next day really put me  back in the "let's eat all the bread now!" mindset. Fresh bread became a treat again because I wasn't having a scarcity mindset about it.

But I wonder: does something you have every day really count as a treat?

My First World Problems

Two days ago I was pumped up and primed to tell you all about Day 2 of the February Bread Challenge, and how hard it was for me because I was, as usual, overthinking everything and just couldn't figure out who would be best to give that day's bread to. But these tribulations are a story for another day. So there I am, logging onto my year-and-a-half-old iMac, and it keeps rejecting my password. A few restarts later, it became clear something was very wrong. Trying to get the computer working again has eaten up a bunch of time over the past couple of days and it still isn't working; even if it does start to work, there may be damage to the hard drive (the desk-ish thing we bought at IKEA to house the computer may not have allowed for enough ventilation, and we may have fried the hard drive). Plus, although we had backups of most of the stuff on it, there may be some very old things that weren't backed up, but we aren't really sure. You know, it's been a pain.

When you start a blog, (and when I say "you," of course, I mean, "I") you are putting yourself out there, open to criticism and distain from, well, anyone around the world who has access to the Internet. You start to imagine who might read what you say, and how someone in a different situation than yours might judge you, say, for writing about trivial matters while people are starving.

I don't know if it was this vulnerability to judgement that got me thinking about First World Problems --problems you have to live in a rich country to even imagine-- or if it was an article called "Half the world's richest 1% live in the United States" that my cousin-in-law, who works for the World Bank, posted on Facebook. Here is a quote that has been sticking with me:

In the grand scheme of things, even the poorest 5% of Americans are better off financially than two thirds of the entire world.

I do not post this to trivialize the very real problems of Americans living in poverty. But wow. That is really saying something almost incomprehensible about 2/3 of the people in the world.

As always, The Onion really gets to the crux of the matter in this Point/Counterpoint, although once you get to the second half the humor really drains away.

The problem of the IKEA desk with poor ventilation is, of course, a First World Problem. As my husband put it, I have it so hard because one of the 3 computers in the house may have died (here I  disclaim: "the other 2 computers are old and we don't really use them anymore; I don't want you to get the impression that we use 3 computers in our house! I mean, unless someone in visiting, and my husband brings his work laptop home...") and the iPhone and 2 iPods ("one of those we got free when we bought our iMac!" I protest; "good heavens, it's not like we BOUGHT 2 iPods!"), are so hard to type on, how will I ever post to my blog?

And pretty much all of the problems I have addressed on this blog are First World Problems. "Oh, I have SO MANY CLOTHES in my closet, it just makes me feel like I  have NOTHING!" "Oh, I own 2 houses (disclaimer: not outright; we have mortgages), if only I could just SELL one and be DONE with it!" "Oh, I have to CHOOSE which TV to buy but there are TOO MANY OPTIONS!" "Oh, I have SO MUCH BREAD! How will I EVER give it all away!" Please. It's disgraceful.

But is it really simply that I'm a selfish boor? I think it's maybe part of human nature. From the Wikipedia entry for hedonic treadmill:

The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the supposed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.^[1] According to this theory, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness. 

So maybe it's not our fault, per se, that we think Cracker Barrel running out of Chicken and Rice on a Saturday night is a major problem. Maybe we in the first world are no shallower than those in the world who have, literally, nothing. Just a whole lot luckier to live where we live.

And now, if you feel like you need to assuage some First World Guilt, here's a link to Heifer International.

February Bread Challenge, Day 1

I'm not going to post about this day-by-day, I don't think, because then I'd never post about anything else. But since it's the first day...

I mixed up dough for 2 loaves last night and figured out how I could come down at 5:50 when the alarm goes off, put the dough into pans and stick it in the oven. Then, using the "time bake" feature on our 1988 oven, not have to do anything else until taking it out of the oven at 7:30. This is a new routine, and that is one thing I hope to get out of this project: incentive to try new ways to bake bread--improvements, shortcuts, etc.--to see what works and what doesn't, thereby expanding my skills and knowledge. One thing I learned is that it can be hard to know if the oven's on when you're using "time bake", but if you start twiddling knobs in a panic, you are likely to turn off the oven and not realize it until later, at which point you will have no idea how long your bread has baked at what temperature. Another thing I learned is that you can turn the oven back on and guess about the time and the bread will still come out yummy.

Now, the other part of the challenge is what to do with all the bread. My lovely, generous, deserving friend Tina, whom I have mentioned before in regards to laundry, came over for tea and a visit this morning, and I thought giving her a loaf of bread would be the perfect start to this project, since the first time I met her and her partner and her daughter was when they signed up through the local mom's listserve and brought a meal to us after we had our baby after we moved here and knew no one. They are stunningly giving and ready to help other people in need. I am working on being more like them, but I have an awfully long way to go. Long story short: Tina's partner has celiac disease, and Tina thought it would take her forever to eat a loaf of bread, so we ate some together, and I'm going to give the other loaf to...someone else. 

Unresolved questions re: goals and procedures for FBC: is it that I'm making bread (loosely defined as either something with yeast OR a flatbread) every day? Or is it that I am giving away bread every day? Or both? I'm not sure. And I am thinking right now I will do it every day of the month, but we'll see how I feel on the weekend. Or tomorrow. I'm not making any promises here.

And, what the heck. I'll post a picture of the bread.