The traditional Taking Down of the Outside Lights is done, and I bagged all the old dead solar walkway lights, the half-dead net lights, and the disintegrating plant pot that’s been sitting outside our door and trashed everything. Which makes me feel virtuous and productive until I take a good look at the yards front and back and realize how much work I’m gonna have to do out there in the next few months before Spring starts with a vengeance.

Mulch. We are in desperate need of mulch in all of our flower beds, at least eighteen bags’ worth, and Muggins here will be the one who will be hauling it back from Home Depot and spreading it (yes, we have a lawn service but things like mulch spreading costs extra and we don’t have the spare cash for that right now).

Trimming the lantana. Assuming that it survives our brief freeze last month I need to trim back the T/r/i/f/f/i/d/s/ lantana in the two back yard flower beds and hope that they behave come spring.

The back yard proper. We have lost a ton of dirt in the far right corner of the yard due to subsidence and we need to lay down more soil if we want to have a hope in hell of grass this year. I’m estimating at least ten bags of dirt need to be spread, maybe more, plus grass seed. Once again, I will be strapping on my braces and singing hosannas to my knee surgeon for the ability to do this work.

The old tree bed. We have a round brick enclosure out front that used to surround the live oak that we had taken down a couple of years ago. We never had the stump pulled and I dumped a few bags of dirt and mulch in there to cover it up but that was about it. What I’d like to do this year is install the sundial I bought last year on the stump, add another couple bags of dirt and mulch, and plant some sort of light-loving low flowers that can spill over the walls. Need to muse on this some more.

I was standing there making Paul Hollywood’s Holiday Leftovers Chelsea Buns recipe, as you do, only I was using tomato sauce, sauteed onions, and cooked mild Italian sausage to make an pizza version (yes, I know I just re-invented the calzone, go away) and thinking about how I was going to sugar down some blackberries and pomegranate arils for ice cream afterwards, when I thought about my mom and how astounded she would be to see me making this kind of food.

Mom didn’t have time to get wild and crazy in the kitchen. She was raising three kids, working full time, and dealing with a home life that was not ideal. So throwing some frozen veggies in a pot to boil and roasting some sort of protein with mashed potatoes or french fries on the side for dinner was perfectly adequate—it kept us fed and it was easy to clean up afterwards. Plus she didn’t like cooking all that much, although apparently she was much better than my maternal grandmother who thought that ketchup could be used as a sauce on spaghetti.

I remember Mom bringing home a pomegranate one day when we were little and cutting it down the center, then handing us toothpicks so that we could pick out the arils and eat them. They were delicious, mind you, but that was also a lot of work for three somewhat uncoordinated kids. There was no way she could have known the easy way to de-aril a pomegranate by cutting off the top, cutting down the four or five seams on the side, then opening it like an orange and popping the arils off into a bowl.

But she was a good baker and liked making Chruściki at Christmas (at least I think she did—we were too eager to eat those powdered sugar-covered delights to ask how she felt about making them). I don’t know if she would have tried many of the recipes but I think she would have enjoyed the Great British Bake-Off. And I’m pretty damn sure that she would love these Pizza Chelsea buns.

I just finished a post on the other blog about having planned out so much for this weekend only to watch a good half of it fall by the wayside. Which happens—sleep cycles get hosed, emergencies occur, and some times you just aren’t feeling it and say, “Fuck it.”

Except that I have this inner critic who rails at me if I don’t get shit done on schedule. And no, I don’t have ADHD (I’ve been tested). Instead, I have an internalized group of Eastern European female ancestors who tell me that I’ll bring shame on my family if my house isn’t clean, I leave craft projects to moulder, my husband isn’t fed dinner regularly, and I don’t churn out a minimum of six books a year.

Maybe it comes from being a latchkey kid, I dunno. When I was in sixth grade or so my mother had an argument with my grandmother who had been babysitting us. Mom then announced that Grandma wouldn’t be babysitting us anymore, my sister and I were old enough to look after ourselves and my little brother after school, and we would have chores that we were expected to do before she got home.

So we’d come home from school, S would tidy up, dust, and vacuum the living room, I would clean the kitchen, unload the dishwasher, and sweep the floor, and our brother would take out the garbage. After that we were expected to do any homework we had and let my brother watch The Three Stooges on Channel 32. I’m not complaining about this, mind you—it wasn’t difficult and didn’t take that long. But the whole idea of “You have to do your chores no matter what” got so ingrained in me that one day I came home with a stomach virus, cleaned the kitchen, puked in the sink, then cleaned that up before staggered up to bed.

So I’m not comfortable if my mental list of chores aren’t done, but I’m also in my mid-fifties which means my body usually hurts when I wake up and on some days I don’t want to go outside and fix the fence or take down the Christmas lights or stand for a long time while I knead dough. And yet they have to be done, and not doing them makes me feel like a slacker.

I probably need therapy. I wish my therapist friend in Florida did telehealth because I would pay him for sessions without hesitation.