on working really hard without having much to show for it

Written yesterday:

I accomplished a lot today. But for some reason I just feel discouraged. I had a lot of things I needed to do today. I had my mineralogy class this morning, which was fun, and then I had an appointment half an hour away in Hillsborough, after which I wanted to go to the library, see if there was anything good at the PTA thrift shop, get some money out of my bank account, get some things that were on sale at Kroger and Harris Teeter, and then try to catch up on my Calculus and make some bread before bedtime. We got to Hillsborough, the library, the bank, and Harris Teeter, but by the time we were done at Harris Teeter I knew we had to come home. Kevin was bored to tears and kept throwing the frozen vegetables on the floor, and he screamed much of the way home. At the library he was throwing books everywhere, faster than I could put them away, and in my head I was feeling like such a hypocrite because I was a library aide in fifth grade and eighth grade and I hated it when people just stuffed books wherever instead of putting them where they belong or at least giving them to a librarian to reshelf. That's how books disappear. At least they were still on the right shelf, right? And all of that was for me to pick up one book on CD to listen to in the car. At the bank he kept trying to run out the doors. It's kind of odd, because normally I know better than to try to get that much done when I've brought Kevin with me. For some reason I just planned out the whole trip and figured all the little stops wouldn't make much difference, but of course they did. Before Kevin was born I could do that. I could stop at the PTA thrift shop, then Goodwill, then Kroger, then the library, then the bank, and so on. And then when he was born I would very carefully plan my grocery shopping trips. I knew that I had to get everything planned and packed and ready while he was napping so that I could feed him as soon as he woke up and then go straight to the store, and I knew that I had about an hour to get it all done before he couldn't stand it anymore. It's better now because he can be awake for longer than that, but now the problem is that he won't hold still because he's bored. I may have to start getting groceries late at night after Ryan gets home and we have dinner so that I don't have to bring Kevin, but I don't want to because it's dark and it's late and I'd rather be with Ryan and all the good deals are out of stock.

I came home and felt like complaining that I didn't get anything done today.

It makes me think of something a friend of mine blogged about recently. She talked about how the best things are not convenient. Being a mother isn't terribly convenient, but it's still worth the effort and the challenges.

Continued today:

One of the reasons I was so disappointed that I didn't get everything done was because I had been planning to buy milk at Kroger (oh, and also Butterfingers). We've been going without milk for four or five days because I didn't have time to go grocery shopping between conference and Sunday and having class all afternoon on Monday. It was a lesson for us about what we would do in an emergency where we couldn't go to the store for a while, and it kind of makes me think that maybe we should try to get used to drinking powdered milk so that eating cold cereal with powdered milk will be possible (which it isn't right now, at least not for me).

So this morning I woke up and realized that we had no milk, so we couldn't have cereal for breakfast, and we had no bread because we finished it off yesterday and I didn't have time to make more because of the other errands. So I made muffins, and they were yummy. It made me feel good because muffins require milk and eggs, and yet I didn't have to use a single perishable item to make the muffins. Everyday emergencies happen. Store powdered milk and powdered eggs.

I had no measuring cups except a 1/3 cup and a 1/4 cup to use to make the muffins. But fortunately, I am somewhat advanced in math and I know how to make 2 1/2 cups from 1/3 and 1/4 cups.

To my credit, we did a lot of baking this weekend and the measuring cups were all in the dishwasher, but the dishwasher wasn't quite full yet so we hadn't started it. So we actually are doing something right. But I do generally feel that for some reason I just can't keep up with the dishes, and the scarier the pile is, the harder it is to bring myself to attack it. Even if I just cleaned the kitchen from top to bottom yesterday, there always seems to be a pile of dishes waiting to be washed. Those dishes are my mortal enemy that won't die. Maybe they're slowly working on me, getting me tireder and tireder so that one day they can attack and easily defeat me.

Well, this morning I finished up those muffins and popped them in the oven, and then I turned and stared at that pile in the sink, and I thought, "Okay, this is just wrong. I just used that bowl for popcorn, so why did I let it sit there and get filled with spaghetti sauce water?" This is a perfect example of a little word that I learned from Don Aslett: "procrustination." [sic] [or sick] It would have taken me ten seconds to wash that bowl, but because I decided that it could wait, I ended up have to spend much longer and use much more soap because it was so procrustinated. [sic/sick] So, as I often do when situations like this arise, I attacked those dishes with a vengeance, and by the time the muffins had cooked, I had managed to get them to retreat. Maybe what those dishes need is to be beaten into submission.

I often think that it would be a very good idea to make a rule for myself that the dishes must be washed or else in the dishwasher ready to be washed before I go to bed at night. Think of the freedom I would experience every morning if I woke up to an empty sink.

You probably fall into one of two groups of people. The first group is rolling their eyes and can't believe how silly I am. The second group is secretly thinking, "I can totally relate." The first group may be thinking that also. I hope both are still my friends.

In my defense, sometimes it's hard to get to the dishes when you know that if you focus on the dishes the rest of the house will be trashed while you're up to your elbows in soapy water. Sometimes I find myself washing dishes while Kevin is strewing all the clean dishes from the lower cupboards all over the floor. Seems a little counterproductive . . . which is an interesting word for me to use in this context since I'm being productive at the level of the counter while Kevin is making a mess at the ground level.

using powdered milk in everyday cooking

RT and I have been talking lately about how lots of people think of food storage as weird food that nobody would normally eat--like pickled watermelon rinds. My parents have always been good at using long-term food storage that normal people eat, so I guess I missed out on this misconception. I remember once when I was a teenager I was in Relief Society for some reason and a sister made an announcement about doing some dry-pack canning. She passed around a plastic bag with some weird brown crusty stuff in it. I will never know what it was, but it was not normal food. Someone in the room made a comment about how frustrating it was to have to throw away and replace your year's supply every year. I was so confused. Why would you store food you don't eat? Like I said, my parents just rotated through their food storage and used what they bought, so that was what I thought food storage was. (I was right, by the way.)

With that in mind, I would like to share with you how you can use powdered milk in everyday cooking. Where I live, milk is expensive, and using powdered milk has saved us some money (at least a dollar per gallon). It's very simple: when you have a recipe that calls for regular milk, use powdered milk. When I'm baking, I add the powder to the dry ingredients and the water to the wet ingredients. When I'm making a cream-based soup, I make several cups of powdered milk and use that instead of my store-bought milk. When I make a white sauce for macaroni and cheese or tuna noodle casserole, I use powdered milk. It's not a lot of work, and the food tastes just the same. We don't drink powdered milk or pour it on our cereal because we prefer store-bought milk for that. My point is, we're making normal food that we like, and we're still using our powdered milk. So if we need to get by using just powdered milk for a while, we may not be able to do everything with milk like we normally do--a lot of normal foods aren't going to work in an emergency--but we can still have many of our favorite recipes with milk. Doesn't that sound better than pulling out cans of weird brown crusty stuff?