Couscous dreams

 How long can Monday motivation last?

Chocolate crinkle cookies - Cooks Illustrated recipe. I made these to put in packages to send to our family members for Christmas, and they're just so cute! I had to share.

A friend and I recently chatted about how we felt like we had been unable to focus enough to dig in to work since early November. How recent was this conversation? Oh, probably a week ago. So that's been quite a stretch of time! I tend to be gentle with myself around the holidays, and especially this week between Christmas and New Year's Day because it is a bit of a time warp. But yesterday I really was in the first groove with work that I've been in for weeks. Thank goodness!

Can I attribute the energy to my new creative outlet? I don't know! Perhaps I had strong new-week energy yesterday and I'll get tuckered out for Tuesday. But I'm definitely starting my day with blogging again today and hoping for the best.

Do you have productivity tricks? I've never really stuck to one or another. I used to have a pretty elaborate post-it note system where I would use each note for a particular 'to-do' item and move them around as I worked through them. I haven't done that in some time. Do you have time management tricks? I used to be pretty beholden to a fifteen-minute-interval day planner, and that worked for the purposes I used to have. Nowadays, because I essentially have a continuous stream of work, I tend to try to break my day up into 'work chunks' and 'break chunks'. So I'll work consistently for a stretch of time and set a timer. When the timer goes off, I stand up to pace, drink water, read three pages of a book on my kindle, or grab a snack. I set a timer for the break too.

I like hearing about other methods!

Kept it simple

Last night, my husband cooked dinner while I finished a workout on our stationary bike. He cooked a dish from another of our new cookbooks, Keeping It Simple: Easy Weeknight One-Pot Recipes by Yasmin Fahr. This is the first thing we have cooked from her book: butternut couscous and crispy pancetta. And though I didn't do the cooking, I did plenty of the eating and wow(!) it was delicious! It was indeed a one-pot meal, which made cleanup a breeze. And the dish was full of heat and creaminess (without any dairy in it). And packed with veggies! This would be an excellent thing to make in Autumn when everyone has squash from the farmer's markets. And you could 100% swap bacon for the pancetta if that's what you had on hand, or make it vegetarian and just omit the meat.

Butternut couscous with crispy pancetta from Keeping it Simple

What I read:

Last night, I stayed up late to finish Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraithe (J.K. Rowling's penname). Like *hours* past my bedtime! I am just amazed; Rowling just keeps writing things that immerse me in her writing and that I want to read. She's like Taylor Swift in that way. Both of them just keep making stuff I want to read/listen to. If you've read any of the Cormoran Strike books (Troubled Blood is in a series of books about the same private detective, Cormoran Strike), this was definitely in line with the rest: some deeply creepy characters, and a twisty world of liars. I was genuinely surprised by the ending, but it wrapped up neatly.

Now, I'll turn back to These Beautiful Bones by Emily Stimpson. An extremely different vibe. I also received a book for Christmas that I look forward to digging in to.

The day's delights:

• Yesterday, I took a gift for a family member to the post office and dropped off a round of thank you notes and Christmas cards--even in a pandemic, I find something quaint and nice about dropping letters off inside a post office;
• I got an excellent sweat from yesterday's stationary bike workout;
• we received some packages that had been delayed in delivering, and we had a ton of fun opening some additional gifts;
• today, we are expecting several inches (knock on wood) of snow, and I'm so excited;
• call me crazy, but I think I can tell the days are getting longer finally(!); and 
• this morning, I'll eat the last of our Christmas Scones (Cook's Illustrated Blueberry Scones... but made on Christmas).

There is something to delight in today, A