Domestic and imaginary

[mrissa]

My pleasures today are domestic and imaginary. The last pan of oatmeal raisin cookies is out of the oven, and so the house smells like cinnamon, allspice, and cloves, with oats to steady them. This is one of the scent-combinations that says, "Someone loves this house," to me. I'll soon have to figure out what we're having for dinner and who's cooking it, but until then, we'll have the smell of spice cookies.

The book is booking. Book book book. It's being enough fun and absorbing enough that I will be surprised if I take my birthday off this year. I can, of course. It's my birthday. I can do what I like, approximately, within reasonable limits. It's just that I suspect that what I like will involve some book, and that's a good thing.

(Thursday is my birthday. Somewhere around Saturday my brain switched over into pre-birthday mode. Birthday! Birthday birthday! I like birthdays. We are very good at birthdays in my family.)

I'm enjoying this period of rereading before my birthday. I got to open the presents from seagrit and jffgrnfld and Amber when they were here, and markgritter finished his copy of HP7, but I'm going to hold off until after my birthday to dive into that pile, because lots of rereading all at once feels like fun right now.

Okay. Dinner cogitating. Then more book.

Comments

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

I cannot fathom how you could ever make a cookie involving oatmeal that was not the oatmeal sugar cookie you shared your recipe for. I mean, it has become the end-all-be-all, the one true faith, the Holy Grail of oatmeal cookies in my kitchen.

I'm sure your current cookies are lovely too. I'm just a hopeless screaming fan girl for the other ones. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

See, the raisins and allspice and cloves and cinnamon make them totally different things to me. It's like saying that you wouldn't want to make strawberry shortcakes because you could have chocolate cake: they're both good, just in different ways.

But I'm glad the others were such a hit. Old family recipe, much loved.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

I suppose you have a point. I *am* fond of spice cookies, although all raisins mean to me is something I have to pick out of the cookie. My spice cookie standbys are pumpkin cookies (oh so good) and pfeffernuse.

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

Yayy oatmeal raisin cookies! Yayy birthdays!!!

(I like birthdays too.)

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

When she was in the Peace Corps, my college roommate wrote to me that no matter how busy she got, she appreciated having the freedom to control her own time and decide what to do when - she didn't think she'd ever have such freedom again. I'm not sure whether that's true for her life (she has two small kids and works as a consultant for the World Bank) but it certainly is for mine. The thing that sounds most wonderful to me about your life (and I know I've said this before but it still keeps hitting me over the head when I read your posts) is the control you have over your time. Thousands of things to do, yeah, but you decide in which order to do them and for at least some of them, you're the one who decides what needs to be done.

I could certainly bake cookies on a workday; I just can't decide to do it at any time, even if I'm having a slow half-hour at the office. There are trade-offs to what I do, both good and bad. One good one is that it's something I do have the skills to do reasonably well. But the bad one is that working in an office generally means giving up control of your own time for a large part of your day.

So many job-related choices seem to involve choosing between time and money. Sucky situations are when you have neither. In great jobs you get both. the great jobs, by that definition, are sadly few and far between. (I can come up with bestselling authors and full professors, and generally both have a lot of years of paying their dues to get there.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

For a lot of them I'm the one who decides what needs to be done. Yes. I mean, some things force my hand: the driveway was cracking and buckling. But it was still on me to say yes, today I will call about this and make arrangements, not next week but today.

[carbonel]

Is there a use for additional baked goods on Saturday, or would that be excessive?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Of course excessive. But excessive by no means implies unwelcome.