How nice

Wake up.
It’s later than you think.
You have home office.
Wife has let you sleep.
How nice!
Check whether phone has charged over night or just sat there on the end of its charger cable like a horse led to water but not drinking.
100%
How nice!
You have to bake bread. When will you do that?
Think about when.
Start thinking about the nature of time.
Other job sends you 14 texts to correct.
Correct for a while.
Take a shower.
Make schnitzel.
Eat lunch.
Go to in-laws to arrange pills for the coming week.
Set up bird feeder while you’re there.
Then fetch two more bird feeders from the attic and set them up.
No not there on that bush, they should be on the other bush.
No the first bush after all. Are they too high?
Should they be lower?
Maybe that’s okay.
Go home and work some more while wife gets fall grave decorations for the grave.
Start bread.
Wife comes home and wants pumpkin pie.
Isn’t bread enough?
Bread isn’t enough.
Look up various pumpkin pie recipes to confirm your theory that you lack ingredients while wife is picking pumpkin in back yard.
Wife refutes theory.
Bake pie.
Bread is photogenic, post picture to Instagram.
Pie crust shrinks a little, wrong flour maybe. No Instagram for you.
Write blog post.
Go to bed. Soon. Soonish. As soon as the purring cat gets off your face.

Tinnitus hack

My tinnitus sounded like screaming mice yesterday.
My wife and I went for a hike in the woods before it rained and only got a little lost.
I ate a slice of bread when we got home.
Hey, that’s moldy, said my wife.
I spit it out but had already swallowed some.
It was whole-grain bread I had baked; it was sort of grayish anyway so the mold didn’t stand out.
I had a bad stomach ache. I don’t know if it was bc of the mold, but that’s my guess. It felt like all the other times I’ve poisoned myself.
I slept on the sofa in case it was not the mold but rather something contagious.
The cats liked that.
Today I feel better.
My wife cooked borscht, with a beet from our garden. It was good.
It’s a gray old day outside.

On bread

Chances are, you have already been the recipient of fallout from my current Bread Phase.
I have been posting pics of nearly every loaf I bake to Instagram, and find myself unable to STFU about my bread efforts while talking to friends. Or when corresponding via WhatsApp.
A friend told me, “I have to admit, I didn’t finish reading your bread story because I am just not interested in baking” so she gets extra bread updates now. I think of it as a meta-apology for unwanted bread stories.
I asked my wife, “did I tell you about (private bread story involving a dream)?” to which she replied, “yeah about ten times a day.”
Yesterday I started telling my therapist about my bread story phase, but my enthusiasm took over and I ultimately just told her a bunch of bread stories instead. While talking, i was thinking, god this isn’t going where I intended…
(Currently, I have 3 reliable recipes that i alternate and modify – rye sourdough, wheat sourdough (SanFrancisco sourdough style), and rye/wheat mix non-sourdough, which is a good one when you’re in a “hurry” because it takes only 3-4 hours instead of 24+ hours.)
Good old bread.