Left-Handed Cooking and Whisper-Singing

I feel like I'm constantly struggling to catch up. The dishes are never all done at the same time. There's always a basket of laundry looking at me, either waiting to be washed or folded and shelved. And a blog post, there always seems to be a blog post that needs writing, but hardly ever enough simultaneous creativity, mental acuity, and time with which to craft something interesting with minimal typos.

I've still not recovered from the holidays, you could say. On about the 7th or so, I was chopping wood with a migraine that I'd had since christmas and took an axe to my right index finger. I was lucky that I only required six stitches, but my right hand has been mostly unusable since. And I'm not great with my left hand. I can write backwards with it, use a mouse, and eat with chopsticks like a pro, but when it comes to buttoning my pants, wiping my butt, or cooking dinner, if I don't have my right hand, I'm clumsy at best. Yesterday, finally, I was able to do dishes and today I'm typing again with very little pain. So, that's good.

My birthday was on the 12th, and I let myself get talked into a small family lunch to celebrate. My very loving and well-intentioned family started singing happy birthday when they served the cake and my head exploded, so I clapped my hands to my ears before they'd gotten past the first syllable and I'm not sure why, but I was just so embarrassed when they started whisper-singing. I'll blame it on migraine-related disorientation, since we'd already been there an hour, the house was mildly scented and all six of my lovely family members seemed to be talking at the same time in a room with hard-wood floors. Really, I was pretty much useless five minutes in.

I've been wanting to sew lately, but half of my sewing supplies are still in the city. I'm not happy about it.

Instead of sewing, the past few days I've been focused on cooking. I made pierogi, my first ever, and they came out really nice, but kind of enormous. I made some bean-based veggie burger/meatballs and they came out pretty good, too. The key to success there is mushrooms, I think. Then I made some kickass chili and a polenta cornbread that came out gorgeous, tasty, and charmingly dense. Then, I decided to make some spinach ravioli and oh hey, rolling out dough for ravs is a serious endeavor. It doesn't help that we don't have a proper rolling pin, just a little one that's always been fine for small projects, but ravioli are some manual labor. Also, my finger still hurts when I bother it, and it seemed to dislike the dough-rolling very much. And I'd already been standing and cleaning and cooking for hours so then my head chimed in and I only managed to get about 10 ravioli done before I started crying and my boyfriend had to take over.

And then I was in a sour, migrainy mood and kept wandering into the kitchen to criticize how he was rolling the dough (too thick! are you mad!?) until I realized I hadn't eaten in a while, so I nommed on a little leftover aloo palak, rested, and then managed to whip up a nice mushroom cream sauce for the ravioli dinner my boyfriend made. So, it ended up ok in the end, but I don't think I'll ever attempt to make them by hand again.