Melissa will be watching Kavi from 8:30 - 4:30 today. I'm hoping to get a lot of focused writing work done this morning. Goal: draft 2-3 chapters of the nonfiction book. I only have 5 chapters left, and they take about an hour to write each (they're very short right now, and I'm working from trip notes for every other chapter, so they can go pretty quick). I'm hoping to finish the draft by Wednesday, so I can send it out to workshop in reasonable time.
I had planned to send it out last Saturday, but I completely failed to do any writing last week. On all three of my work days, I obsessively cleaned instead. I know, it sounds insane, to spend three days cleaning, but it's not normal keep-up-the-house cleaning; it's still the get-back-from-four-months-away cleaning. So it's finding things we need that have been stashed away, and unstashing them, and reorganizing everything that our tenant reorganized to suit her needs, and unpacking and gosh, this is boring, never mind, the point is that there was a ton of it to do, and I'd been doing it slowly since we got back, but now that we're so! close! to! done! I just can't seem to let it sit anymore and I've been truly obsessive about getting it done. One exercise/art area left to organize, two bathrooms left to clean, one pantry and set of files needing minor clean-up. But I really am going to try to not use my babysitting time for it this week, because I need to get this book finished in time for workshop. We'll see how I do -- I have a very hard time concentrating on mental work when there's cleaning to be done. I also can't work with a cluttered desk or cluttered computer desktop. I don't understand people (Kevin, Jed, e.g.) who can.
I would have gotten some of the work done yesterday, but I had made a commitment I needed to fulfill. Last spring, I donated a Sri Lankan cooking lesson for four to the SAPAC Voices of Resistance silent auction. The winner was kind enough to put off collecting her prize until after I had the baby, recovered a bit, and came back to town. So she and two friends came by yesterday, and we cooked. We had:
- mango mimosas
- cheddar cheese / mango chutney / crackers -- this is not particularly Sri Lankan, but a yummy combination and a nice appetizer for a S. Asian meal
- samosas -- not Sri Lankan either, but I was up on Devon Saturday getting curry powder so I picked some up from Tahoora
- beef and potato curry
- salmon curry
- beet curry
- cauliflower curry
- beet green mallung
- a colorful selection of Indian sweets (also from Tahoora)
- vanilla ice cream, mango sorbet, and fresh mango (okay, from a jar, but it's tough to get fresh mango in Chicago in winter)
Plan for today: once she wakes up, take care of Kavi until Melissa arrives; settle down and write for a few hours. Break for lunch and long-ish walk with Ellie. If I've actually written enough, then I get to paint in the afternoon; I've been dying to get some painting done, and really cranky about not having the chance to. Esp. because one painting project I want to do needs to be finished by mid-March, so it can make it to my sister in time for her birthday. If it comes out decent. Which it may not. But I won't know unless I actually try...