Oh, right. Cleaning.

Well, let’s pretend I did that today.

No? You don’t believe me? Well, you’re right.

Instead, I slept in, watched a vegetarian cooking show, bought yarn at a cool shop in Rockville, Maryland, and bought some more storage containers at Ikea.

Tonight? We’re heading to see Thank You for Smoking with Susan and Phillip as soon as we’ve eaten our pasta.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll have a tidier day.

Why is it that in order to make a home tidier, it is necessary to totally mess it up first?

I have been feeling down of late. This is nothing new, as I have gone through periodic bouts of depression for as long as I can remember. Usually it’s caused by the need to make some changes in my life that I’m resistant to making or don’t know how to go about putting into action.

The advantage of being an adult is that when I was a teenager, when I hit a depression, I thought it would last forever. Now I know that although I don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, it is, in fact, there and I just have to wait it out. Waiting is not easy, nor is it comfortable. But I can do it and knowing things will seem better eventually makes it bearable.

The waiting seems to have paid off because while I was asleep last night something seems to have shifted in my brain. I woke up this morning feeling … alive. I still haven’t resolved the things in my life that I need to alter. But I know that I will figure them out and that now I can push those thoughts to the side and focus on other things (like cleaning up the Burrow or spending more time outside (and, yes, I do know those are two contradictory things I need to accomplish)) for a while. Sometimes you can only find clarity by not looking at things too intensely.

We’re back in D.C. after three days of vacation. While in Connecticut, I:

• Ate pizza at Modern Apizza (easily the best pizzeria in the state, possibly in the country) with friends, the most recent of whom I’ve known for six years now, the oldest of whom I’ve known for half my lifetime. The gathering also included Rudi and both my ex-boyfriends.
• Bought pastries at Libby’s Pastry Shop for Easter Eve dessert. Cannolis and eclairs are almost always good dessert choices, but Libby’s takes them to another level. After 84 years, though, they ought to have it down. Plus we got to eat Italian ice. Can’t beat $1.25 for a squeeze cup of frozen sweetness…
• Had brunch with another friend who couldn’t make it the night before for pizza. She is the storyteller amongst our group of friends, and she did not disappoint. Although we had to wait forever for the waitress to bring coffee refills, that was not the real reason the meal lasted 2 1/2 hours.
• Found and bought two pairs of the sandals I loved last summer so much that I wore them to death. Note to self: treat these better so they are useful for more than one season.
• Made scones with Dad.
• Ate a delicious turkey dinner with chocolate torte for dessert prepared by Mum and Gramma for Easter. Mum packed up a ton of food for us to bring home (over my protestations), which made a tired, PMSy Monday night much more bearable. As usual, you were right, Mum.
• Birdwatched. My folks live on a great piece of property nicknamed Turkey Ridge where they attract birds of all ilk to come eat at their feeders. The turkeys are nesting for the season, so they didn’t make an appearance, but we did see gold finches, purple finches, several varieties of woodpeckers, titmouses, cardinals, blue jays, snow birds, chickadees, and others flitting around.
• Wound my 500 yards of yarn into a reasonable facsimile of a center-pull ball. Usually I just wind into a ball that rolls around while I knit, but when my ball reached the size of a softball (which is about as large as is comfortable to hold for long periods of time) and it didn’t look like I’d even started winding, I knew I’d have to come up with a revised plan. I had brought the size 17 needles that the yarn’s project is going to be knit on with me and decided I could use one of them to wind the ball around. It took two days to finish, but it is very pretty to look at. I’m somewhat loath to mess it up by starting the shawl that it will eventually become.

The weekend was not without its hitches. I didn’t spend enough time outside. We didn’t get to meet John’s fiancée because she was suffering through a nasty case of strep. Another get-together fell through at the last minute, much to my disappointment. And after an abrupt about-face at the end of Easter dinner designed to get us moving homeward in a timely fashion brought a sudden end to a relaxing family meal, I ended up in tears, which just made everyone unhappy, grumpy, or uncomfortable.

I guess it can’t all be smooth sailing, can it?

But could we have another long weekend soon?

How likely is it that I would be fired if I wrote into the small-print publication info at the beginning of the book I’m editing that the reason this book is incomprehensible to anyone other than rocket scientists is because it was funded and edited (and stronghanded) by the very same?

I can’t wait to put this project in a drawer.

I have a coworker who likes to raid my candy jar. Because I also like to raid my candy jar, I tend to keep it empty.

At some point this week, this coworker must have checked the jar and discovered it was empty and, kindly, bought some jelly beans to fill it with.

Now, she’s in my office every half hour to have a snack. Really, they’re just her jelly beans, moved far away from her desk.

Particularly since these jelly beans are spicy jelly beans. They taste weird — orange mint, cinnamon, licorice, spearmint, and yellow, whose taste is not immediately identifiable and is, therefore, the least offensive.

Aloo saag is good when spicy. And pasta sauce. Curly fries, too.

But definitely not jelly beans.

But I want jelly beans to taste like fruit. (Not, of course, that the fruity jelly beans actually taste like the fruit they are supposed to, but they at least taste like the candy flavorings of those fruits.)

So I stopped out at lunch and bought some fruity jelly beans. [As a side note to my one known vegan reader, Confectionery Lane’s jelly beans, which I bought at CVS for $.50, do not contain gelatin.]

They’ve been added to the candy jar mix, hopefully giving everyone who stops by a chance to end up with a good jelly bean.