Productive

Today I went grocery shopping. With two children. Half way through I stopped and stuck needles in my eyes to ease the pain of shopping with children. I said 'no you can't have it' about 3,624 times and returned approximately 94 items to the shelves - things like sugary cereals, biscuits, Coca Cola, various toys and some Shrek stickers that hopeful little hands had optimistically placed in the trolley. Then I stood in line awaiting the privilege of having a surly checkout assistant put my shopping through. Then I handed over a sum close to the gross domestic product of a small country and struggled to the car with my trolley load and came home - only to have to unpack it all. That was my morning.

This afternoon I had a bit of a cook-a-thon. I loathe cooking, it digusts me, I hate handling food and am quite repulsed by it being on my hands as I prepare it. The actual work of cooking bores me, it's tedious and repetitive and I'm not keen on sharp knives. In my single days I lived quite happily on omelettes or peanut butter on toast and and a glass of white wine. Nowadays, as a mother, I feel I should at least attempt to prepare meals for my offspring. So I cook. Ironically Tom loves to cook....adores it, is delighted to spend an afternoon puttering in the kitchen, unfortunately he never has time to do that so it's left to me. The one who hates doing it. Have I mentioned how I loathe it?

To make my life easier I try to get a lot done at once, sort of getting it over with. I cook in bulk and freeze things. So apart from those meals that can only be cooked straight before eating, like steak or fish etc, I have some evenings where all I have to do is prepare the accompaniments. I don't always work this way - I'm not that organised, but it is my preferred mode of food preparation and I try to do it when I can. Today I could, so I did. I made a curry, chilli and a pasta sauce - I did double batches of everything. Tomorrow I'm going to make soup.

It was horrible, but it's done.

To cheer myself I cleaned up the computer. I backed everything up, saved stuff to discs and USBs, deleted a bunch of stuff I don't need any more. Burned some recently purchased music and got to work. I did a disc clean and a defrag and sorted out my autostarts. It feels all fresh and nice. I enjoyed that.

So today I was productive. At times resentful, but always productive.