Free time. How do we use it, again...?

Apart from coughing and wheezing, how shall I fill up my day?

I thought I might bake a cake, actually. A chocolate beetroot cake, since you ask. That's got to be sovereign, surely?

In the meantime, I am plagued by senses of inadequacy: surely I should be...? Oh. No.

I just glanced at the time and thought Lord, that's late, I'd best be moving... - and then remembered that my only reason to go to the library today is to change my books. When did that last happen? I disremember.

And then there's administratistuff that I really don't want to do but ought not to put off longer; and there's painting the hallway, except that in a blitz of throwing-stuff-out I seem to have thrown out all the torn & spattered shirts and trousers I kept for painting in; and there's going back to bed, which is curiously appealing. I barely got out of it yesterday, despite the queue of boys wanting brekfuss.

I might make a list, of things I can tick off fairly easily. I have a book to read for blurbing; I could do that. I have to phone Paws Indoors; I could do that. I...

I have a sudden cat in my lap. Hullo, sudden cat.

*stops doing anything*

Some days...

...you do nothing at all. Yesterday would be an instance.

Some days, you walk into the Lit & Phil and there's Seamus Heaney.

Who is small and twinkly, essence of himself. If I bake bread before I wash, will something of that come out in the dough? And if I then ingest it, will it rise up in me, like a leaven...?

In other news, I have just arranged for the boys' favourite person ever (aka the catsitter-man) to come around on Wednesday to collect new key. As I hung up, I remembered the state of the house.

He is not allowed to see the house in this state.

This gives me two days to clean up. And I'm tired, and I feel like crap. Boo.

Stare too long at the vacuum, and you know what happens...

The pinkness! The pinkness!

So. The chocolate beetroot cake is in the oven. The cat is in the chocolate beetroot cake...

Well, no. Not quite. Not for lack of trying. The cat (you may guess which one; you may have seventeen thousand guesses, should you need them [hint: icon]) made determined efforts to plunge headfirst into the mixing-bowl, as soon as I had added the eggy beetrooty vanilla-y sugary goodness to the chocolatiness of the flour. We compromised, and he is currently licking out the bowl, tho' in a slightly disgruntled fashion. He reminds me of myself, when smaller: when my mother would divide up the bowl and the stirring-spoon between her two nearest or youngest or most annoying offspring - the little licks, we called this - and we would endeavour to persuade her that really it should be the little licks that went into the oven while we got the cake-batter, please...

In other news, the pinkness. I should really have taken photos as I went, because the pinkness of the egg/beetroot/sugar mixture had to be seen; you will not believe a mere verbal report. Also, the pinkness of my fingers.

If it's as nice as it deserves to be, I will post a recipe; otherwise, I'll just post a review.

Now, how to compound an icing out of white chocolate and cream...?

Ahem

Sometimes, I may not be even as bright as I think I am.

Y'know where I said a couple of hours, a couple of posts ago, that I needed to give serious attention to cleaning this place up before the catsitter popped round?

I may be the first person ever in the history of ever to feel that it was a good idea to begin a spring-clean by baking cake.

I cannot believe that one little cake could have generated so much mess...

[Cynical aside from the rest of the world: "Chaz, cakes don't generate mess; people do."]

Anyway. I was going to sit down with a bottle of wine and a book. Now I'm going to do some washing-up, and despair.