Today in Mommyland…

Spent the whole weekend cleaning like a banshee with Andy and B-Bug in order to take videos of each of the rooms in our house to send to our landlords to create a “virtual tour” of the place. Yay pandemic real estate processes… Needless to say, homeschooling an active 5yo and adjusting to having an infant around the house again, AND planning a move has left the place in less than tidy shape, so it took some real elbow grease to get the downstairs and B-Bug’s room in shape for videoing. But we did it! Today, we’re hoping to get the master, office, and final bathroom in shape, and video those, too.

In some ways, it’s kind of helpful because it’s forcing us to start the simplifying/moving process, so none of the effort is wasted. We even booked the pod for end of the month! Eek! It’s coming up so fast! Our big challenge is just to keep–as reasonably as possible–the house tidy for the next four weeks so we have room to pack up everything. Boy, am I missing Savers right now, though! We’ve been listing a lot of things on Craigslist’s Free section, and once the weather gets nicer, I’m hoping to have a permanent table of free things out in our front yard. Just a few things at a time to discourage lots of touching things, but it’d be great not to have to pack a bunch of “To Donate” boxes…

Oh! But I’ve discovered the BEST miso soup recipe! I normally make it with about 4c of broth (chicken or veggie), 3-4tbsp of mild miso paste, 1-2 chopped up nori sheets, and diced tofu, but I saw a recipe for adding mushrooms to it, and as I had an extra container of ‘shrooms sitting about ready to go bad, I threw them in. And OH MOMMA–it’s delightful (and I’m not even much of a mushroom person!). I just did ~4c chicken broth, 1c water, 2 sheets of nori, 1 pint of sliced button mushrooms (washed), 4tbsp of miso (mild yellow), and a handful of green onions. I brought the broth and water to a boil, then added the washed mushrooms and nori (roughly chopped). I forgot about it for probably about 6-8 minutes, or until the nori has basically broken down and the mushrooms had cooked through. Then I took it off the heat, added the green onion, and mixed a cup or so of the hot broth in a separate bowl with the miso. Then I added the mixed in miso back into the pot, and stir it in and VOILA! Gorgeous, rich, satisfying miso soup. Mmmmmm~! So good. I’m going to make a second batch today.

Today in Writerland…

Goldbug fell asleep right as I finished breakfast, and B-Bug wasn’t ready to start schoolwork yet (aka, he was digging into his LEGO to build something specific, and pity the fool who tries to stop the creative effort mid-project!), so I too the opportunity to pin down a few paragraphs of the WiP. I’ve recently gone back to a fantasy novel I’ve been brainstorming for years and decided the best thing I can do for the Frosthaven rewrite is get a bit of mental distance from it. Make a new “baby” writing project, in other words.

So I’m starting this one, no outline, but with two strong-willed main characters who have very distinct (and conflicting) goals. I’ve been trying to write this one by summary-drafting only a chapter ahead, to let myself test out the pacing of the chapter before committing to it, but not to get too far ahead of myself. And really, the only reason I’m doing a written summary at all is because I don’t have time during the day to think about what I’m going to write next, so summarizing kind of fills that gap. With other off-the-cuff projects, I’d tend to just list a couple things each of the next few scenes needed, but I’d have thought through them a lot already. It’s a tricky bit of my process that gets stymied with small children underfoot. Still working out the kinks on that, but the written chapter summary seems to be a tolerable bandaid in the meantime.