I promise, this isn't another post about my new puppy, Scout.
Well, maybe just a little bit because she really is just so darn cute, and because her nickname seems to be Li'l Bit.
Okay, that's all. I promise. For now.
No, what I really wanted to write about was baking bread. You know, the fresh-baked, hot-out-of-the-oven, completely-from-scratch kind. Like this:
Doesn't it look yummy?
This photo is actually from a couple of weeks ago. Today's loaves didn't last uncut long enough for me to get a photo of them, but I did make three loaves - two plain (like these) and one cinnamon-sugar loaf. This is the third weekend in a row I've made homemade bread, some of the best I've ever made and enough to last us the week. I was thinking today that I should make a weekend habit of baking bread. Plan to make bread every week. Commit to make bread every week.
Yep. Commit. That little word seems to be the death knell for any project I really want to do over an extended length of time.
You may remember that I wrote a while back about participating in a 30-day Sgraffito Challenge. I see from my posts that lasted a whole seven days. Haven't touched it since.
In December, 2011, I set a goal for 2012 of creating 12 works of art, one per month, inspired by the work of different women artists. How many did I get done? One. And it took me way longer than a month. I'm not sure I ever even shared a photo of the finished stained glass piece.
Sketching. Quotation art. Learning to play guitar. Writing blog posts at least twice a week. You name it, I've quit it. Or at least, I've abandoned any commitment to doing it on a regular schedule. It doesn't matter if the commitment was for five minutes a day or to something that would take hours over the course of a month. Even worse, none of these commitments were to things I disliked. They were all to things I enjoyed and wanted to do.
I consider this habit of quitting to be a personal failing, somehow demonstrating a serious lack of character. I can't stand it, but at the same time I can't seem to quit quitting. I'm not quite sure what to do about it since any commitment to change is certainly doomed to failure. I'll figure it out someday. Or not.
In the meantime, I am not committing to baking bread every weekend. If I do great. If I don't, there's always Safeway. Right now, it's time for dinner. Fresh bread with pork ribs, baked potatoes, and corn. Yummy.
