thin

I remember that during graduate school I often felt like I didn't have enough time. In retrospect, nothing could have been further from the truth. In graduate school, you have years -- years to read and to think and to write. You have time to take up a new hobby and you have years to become embroiled in deeply unhealthy emotional entanglements. When I first met J, he talked about wanting to "press pause" on the world, to stop everything and do all of things he that wanted to. I thought that this was absolutely absurd because graduate school felt to me like seven years on pause. It felt like a kind of suspended animation in which I could recognize change in others -- and certainly in the world around me -- but I always felt myself on pause.

Somehow I have skipped play and am now stuck on fast-forward; everything is speeding by and I can hardly catch my breath. J says I'm spread to thin. I race from one class to the office, to a meeting, to another meeting, to my computer. I'm trying to edit a book that is due at the end of June, plan and facilitate a major international conference on women's education, teach an upper-level college seminar, get out my own writing, keep up a long-distance relationship, plan a wedding, and stay sane. Sometimes it feels like just too much. This is when I want to hop a train to Kentucky and hide out from the world with J.

I know that all this complaining is really rather unbecoming. Instead, I should delight in a weekend with my little sis. After all, we sewed together:

It's another project -- a baby burrito wrap -- from the Lotta Jansdotter book. This was my first experience with her patterns. They sort of crack me up. When I was in high school, I first experimented with making clothes for myself. I used to measure my body and then freehand sketch patterns on old newspapers. They were pretty wonky, but I made a bunch of skirts that way, ones that I wore for years and to tatters. My grandmother made the button holes and I'm sure that she was horrified by my slightly uneven hems and sloppy waist bands. In any case, Jansdotter's published patterns are a bit like my high school versions -- freehand, sloppy, maintaining only a casual relationship to accuracy. But I took it in stride and this little number will hopefully calm a new baby due in May.

We also cooked a treat -- an especially rare treat for someone on a sugar elimination diet -- cinnamon rolls. The recipe is from Smitten Kitchen by way of Orangette. Of course they failed to rise properly, but we nevertheless gobbled them up with the help of a friend. Yeast seems sooo stubborn to me. I can never seem to coax it into action, even as I propped the dough bowl on a steam heater. Steam heat I tell you! It should have been quadrupling in size. But alas, no such luck.


While we were still panicking that the cinnamon rolls weren't going to rise at all, we scurried to make a dutch pancake to serve my friend as a first course. I guess you could say that we were raised right: we knew to panic when we invited a friend over for a sweet treat, she was set to arrive in 15 minutes, and we had stubborn dough on our hands. This is where the dutch pancake never fails to delight. Get the oven hot enough and you're golden...and so is it.