Ideas for things I keep saying I’m going to get around to writing:
-A manual for eating locally and seasonably.
-A cookbook based on repurposing leftovers and ideas for cheap, easy pantry meals.
-Stories about our neighborhood and the characters that live here.
-An essay on my cookbook collection.
-An entire book on my cookbook collection, with essays focusing on individual cookbooks and what I like about them.
-Betty Crocker: An origin story, which of course, will get optioned into a movie.
-A book on cooking with kids based on my experiences working with them over the last 6 years after school.
-Making sense of Pat’s Grandma Kilgo’s handwritten recipes and publishing them as a family heirloom.
-Compiling recipes from my side of the family as a companion volume to the Kilgo version for Edie.
-An outline for turning the great poinsettia sale into a movie where the sale gets turned inside out and we’ll just leave it right there for now…hilarity and hi-jinks will ensue of course.
-A pickle book, obviously.
-An ode to cake.
-Regular updates about my garden progress on the blog, not just Instagram.
-All about Hellebores.
-All about Peonies.
-A compilation of all the great opening lines I come up with.
-Expanding upon and writing the pieces that go with the great opening lines I come up with.

Things I keep saying I’m going to do:
-Clean the house.
-Catch up all the laundry and have it stay caught up.
-Reupholster all the furniture.
-Okay, maybe just reupholster that one chair. Okay, two chairs.
-Maybe just make slipcovers instead of reupholstering.
-Rearrange the house so that the living room is a cozy library.
-Create a retreat where I can write whenever I want. A small she-shed perhaps, with a wood burning stove in the back yard. Maybe not too dissimilar to Charles’ wood shop, but smaller.
-Cook my way through some of the cookbooks in my collection. Okay, at least one of them.
-Purge the entire house.
-Sew myself a whole new wardrobe with a focus on muumuus and smock aprons.
-Make patterns out of a few articles of clothing I really like right now so that I have a uniform of sorts.
-Knit everyone sweaters. Okay, vests. Okay, shawls. Okay, maybe just knit myself a new shawl.
-Swear off cake for breakfast.
-Have dinner ready at the actual dinner hour.

What I actually write:
-Lists of things I’m going to write.
-Lists of things I’m going to do.
-Grocery lists.
-To-do lists of things I actually NEED to do.
-A diary of what we eat for dinner every night.
-Lists of produce in the fridge that needs to have something happen to it.

What I actually do:
-Walk around the garden and pull the occasional weed.
-Sew a button on a shirt from the mending pile and consider it progress.
-Locate the vacuum cleaner, think about using it, then realize Pat is on a zoom call and I can’t vacuum right now. The urge leaves for another 24 hours.
-Sit and stare at my computer screen, then fall down internet rabbit holes or maybe just social media, instead of writing.
-Frantically knock out the to-do list of what I can accomplish between 4 and 6 every afternoon so that I can have happy hour and make dinner and say I did something with myself today.
-Make pickles.