stop buying plants and pumpkin cinnamon rolls

Is it any surprise that I am a compulsive buyer of plants? They look so pretty, and they are alive - a living thing - that clean the air, that do all sorts of wonderful things from fruiting and flowering to pushing pelmel over the side of a pot.

I sugar-crashed the other day, and in my post-pumpkin-cinnamon-roll misery, I purchased plants. Boxwood basils, to sit near the front of the door, to grow and blossom. Fresh basil is a wonderful thing. That part of the porch is not yet overgrown. Truly, we have not been here long enough to overgrow anything. All that is overgrown was like that before we got here.

Stop buying plants is the advice I have gotten, and it is good advice and true advice. Because we have seeds. We have plenty of seeds. (I am also, occasionally, a compulsive buyer of seeds, and enjoy saving seeds when I can...)

How much easier it is to purchase living plants than to start a seed. Seeds take weeks to sprout and look like anything at all. Seeds take time

How much easier it must be to co-author with someone, and let someone else take the first steps, and to hand it off when it gets hard. In books, I do not compulsively buy plants. In fact, I would push any such instance of starting from plant away from me, and I would only start from seed.

In books, I am not compulsive. I am slow, methodical, and tedious. I am a boring, boring person most of the time, building up plants from seed a little cell at a time, a little root and leaf at a time.

In life, there is the easy way where you buy plants, and there are times when one should buy plants because fruit trees do take a long time and they are inconsistent when they don't come from a graft. But, most of the time, start from seed.

I've stretched this metaphor enough for one day. But, when I get depressed about writing I fantasize about co-authoring something. Then, the day turns over and it occurs to me that I would prefer not. I would prefer to do the hard stuff myself. In fact, it is the hard stuff, and the miserable waiting period when the hard stuff is working out that I think I like the most. If it's too easy, I lose momentum.

When I am done with this seedling, I shall start another for this shared world...

Oh, and as for the cinnamon rolls, I took half of a roasted pumpkin in a food processor with a cup of dark brown sugar, pinch of salt, and yeast. I added white whole wheat flour until I had a good dough (about 5-6 cups). I let it rise. Then, I rolled it out flat, brushed it with butter, and sprinkled with pumpkin pie spice blend. Rolled up and cut into rolls, I let them rise for an hour before baking at 350 degrees for about twenty to thirty minutes, until the tops were brown and crusty.

Serve with butter and honey. Also, for a sweeter tooth than mine, include brown sugar with the pumpkin pie spice. I'd have added golden raisins if we had any handy.

If only writing books could be explained in a recipe as simply as pumpkin cinnamon rolls.

Creepy Things from SAMA

Leave the lights on tonight. There are old, evil things. They're pushing against the glass when you turn your back. They want to follow you home.

rocket to Mars...

The technology to build a rocket is as old as the technology to build a car. People build cars in their garage. Why don't people build rockets in their garage? Why haven't home hobbyists shot so many rockets to Mars that N.A.S.A. has to dodge them? If you have the tools and the know-how to build a car, build a rocket. Make your moonshot. Make your place on the face of the red planet. Make something. That is all.