I Hate Cooking

I cooked.

Not my meal delivery service, which delivers all my ingredients pre-measured for me. Actually cooked.

I hated it. Every minute.

My meal delivery service had a week where there weren't three meals I wanted to order. The last time this happened, I ordered six meals the previous week and then put half of them in the freezer, but I didn't want to do that again. I decided it can't be that much harder to cook on my own, right?
Wrong.

I picked three recipes. Two were recipes from the meal delivery service that I'd made before (successfully) and one was a recipe that my dad used to make. It's a stew. If I buy everything pre-chopped at the grocery store, it can't be that hard.

OMG! I did have to slice jalapeno peppers for one of the meal delivery service recipes. I washed my hands twice afterward, but two fingers were still burning. I had to take dish soap and wash my hands with that to make it stop.

Second problem. Measuring. I needed two ounces of cheese for one recipe, but they don't sell two ounce bags of shredded mozzarella. Another recipe wanted one ounce of cheddar cheese. Don't even get me started about both recipes asking for small amounts of cream cheese.

Let's just say that the patience it takes to measure is not something I excel at. When I had a chemistry class in middle school, the teacher asked what experiment I was performing because my measurements were weird. Hey, close is good enough. Not for him, though.

These were the two easier recipes. I finally got them both finished and into the fridge. I cook all the meals for the week on one day because I am not putting myself through hell multiple nights.

Then it was onto the recipe my dad used to make.

It's on the stove, not the oven like the other two recipes. I hate the stove. It's gas. I don't like cooking with gas. Gas terrifies me.

I heated up the olive oil like the recipe said, added the meat, got spattered by grease, jerked my arm back, which meant meat landed on the floor. Guess it was too hot? I also got a burn on the inside of my forearm. Yea, cooking! Who doesn't love this?

The rest went better. At least I didn't injure myself again. The recipe didn't turn out as good as when my dad made it, but he cooked with love. I cook with irritation.

It also made one thing clear to me. Meal delivery service for the win. Having them send me everything I need in the pre-measured amounts is worth it. It's going to be a hell of a long time before I try cooking on my own again. Plus, all the leftover cheese and cream cheese. Sigh. 

2027 Line Up

Nothing I mention in this post is sponsored. All products were purchased by me.

Planners are always up in the air until the order is placed. I'm always looking for the next best thing and so I'll check out new planners.

There were two planners that I looked at this year, both for my second brain, and both were rejected. One of them only had six daily pages each week. Excuse me? There are seven days. I am not combining two days.

The other one had a weekly overview page and then the seven days of the week, but there wasn't a vertical weekly for tracking (I can't plan in a vertical) and there were no blank pages to create my dashboard. I guess this planner's weekly overview was supposed to be a dashboard, but it wasn't giving me what I like.

Both of these planners have exploded in the planner YouTube sphere.

I haven't made my final decision on my second brain planner--the most important planner in my lineup. I ordered two options. I didn't mean to buy two, but here we are anyway. I ordered a softcover Complete Planner in A5 size in Vertical weekly from Sterling Ink. My 2026 planner was a hardcover Complete Planner (Hardcover was the only option) and I loved it a lot. I had two friction points with the planner. One, the hardcover. That was fixed. Two, the duplicate weeklies when a week splits across a month. This is still in the planner for 2027 and will still cause friction for me.

Which is why I picked up a Just Scribble A5 Vertical One Volume planner. It's softcover and the layout is very similar to the Complete, but the weekly spreads aren't repeated. (I don't have it yet, but I'm certain I'm right about this.) When I have both planners, I'll flip through them side by side and make my final decision.

The rest of the line up:

Dopamine Writing Planner: This is the one I decorate and color in circles for word count. Read more about it here. I started using this in 2026 for word count and discovered that coloring in circles for every 250 words worked. For 2027 I'm adding the craft element to a 2026 planner that I've re-dated for 2027.

Nuts and Bolts Writing Planner: I tried to do this in the dopamine planner and it didn't work for me. I needed to keep the fun separated from the math. Word count, primarily, but other things that are more functional than fun. For 2026, I was using a Sterling Ink Pocket Horizontal Common Planner. Compact, which means fewer notes pages. I actually don't need any notes pages. I only use the weekly layout.

For 2027 I ordered the Sterling Ink Core planner in the Traveler's Notebook size they call N1. It only has 23 blank pages. I was going to go with another pocket size, but I added an Inbox function to the planner so that I could keep track of things I need to do without jumping up and running to my second-brain planner. With ADHD, it's too easy to forget things if I don't write them down. This way, I can turn, add it to the inbox, and keep writing. But the Inbox took up too much space and I needed to go up a size.

Journal: I was positive I was going to use the Hobonichi A6 planner that I bought in July? August? It's a 2026 planner and my thought was I'd just re-date it and use that. The price was right and the B6 was feeling a little big this year.

I ended up buying another B6 Sterling Ink full year Common Planner in Mulberry because my other three journals are B6 and I decided that having a different size when I archived it would make me nuts. Kind of like when you buy all a series in mass market paperback and then suddenly the series is only coming out in trade paperback. Messes up the shelving. :-) Mulberry is my favorite Sterling Ink color and I will pick it every time.

Unsettled: Do I need a workout planner? This is the question. I actually bought an undated one maybe eight years ago now, but I discovered I like everything in one planner. It annoys me to have to hunt down a separate book. But I don't know. Maybe I'd like this?

The writing stuff? That's different. I transfer the information I want to hold onto from the nuts and bolts writing planner into my second brain every night. At the end of the year, that planner is tossed. The dopamine planner? I'm not keeping that either. (Although I do plan to take pictures of my crafting, no matter how bad I am at it.)

So I'm still mulling this over. I've vacillated between I absolutely want to use this planner to no chance. I'll never keep up with it. Today? It's a I don't need it day.

Coaster

My desk is covered in one of those big desk pads--I'd guess about three-feet wide--and it's bright pink. Or as I refer to the color: Patti Pink.

I also like to drink coffee or water while I'm writing. I used folded up paper towels (at least two of them, sometimes more) to protect the desk pad from spills. Almost worked. I spilled on my right-hand side, where I didn't have any protection. sigh.

Anyway, I've been using the folded up paper towels which were taking up space, but were the best solution until I ordered the Coffee Lovers sticker kit.

I wanted the stickers, and while I knew there were coasters in with the set, I didn't think about them. They were just part of the set and whatever. I have the coffee stickers and a coffee-themed journal.

But then I had this idea. Instead of the paper towels in my office, why not put one of the coasters to work?

This was actually a most excellent idea. The coaster takes up less space than the paper towels did and it's large enough to handle my big coffee cup and my water bottle. Win!

I still have one more coaster in the box with the stickers. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that, but it's there if I need it.

Never thought I'd say this, but I'm glad to have this coaster. 

Unending Washi

I just realized I don't have a picture of any washi tape, so the picture I'm using has dots. I actually like these dots although I haven't used many of them because they're usually not handy. I've mentioned my ADHD and out of sight out of mind problem. Maybe 2027 will be the year.

Because maybe by 2027 I'll have my washi tape wound onto the washi cards that I mentioned a while back.

I'm still winding tape. Sigh.

Part of it is because I have a lot of washi tape. Part of it is because days can go by when I don't touch the project.

However, winding washi tape is surprisingly good for thinking. While it's not exactly the most fun thing I've ever done, there's something soothing about it. Something that gives me time to think about my stories and where I want to go with them.

The soothing also works to calm me down. I had a very hectic morning recently, one where I hit the ground running on multiple fronts, and by the time I worked my way through it all, I felt frazzled. I finally grabbed some washi and started wrapping it around a card. It took two rolls, but it did relax me again.

I have decided that I'm not putting all the washi on cards. The really wide washi? That's staying on the roll. The brand new washi? That's staying on the roll, too.

Overall, though, this project has been good. I'm discovering washi I didn't remember owning (it's that pesky ADHD thing and object impermanence again). Once I'm finished, it's going to be so much easier to find what I want.

Just need to get there first. 

Wrong Place

I use craft carts to store my supplies. There's the stamp cart with all my inks, stamps, cleaning supplies, and acrylic blocks.

I have a sticker cart which I've been trying to reorganize for what seems like forever. My original tactic of stuffing stickers into whichever book they fit in wasn't conducive to actually finding the stickers I wanted to use.

I also have two other carts. The carts are wheeled out as I need them, otherwise they're tucked into the craft room and out of the way.

I do have one cart that's out all the time. It has a lid on top of the highest shelf and I store my planners there as well as other books I grab every day or at least nearly every day. At the moment, while I work on a washi tape organization project, a second cart is beside it.

And this is where the confusion set in. 

The middle shelf of my primary cart is overloaded with small cards and A6 folders storing my icon stickers. They're tipping over and it's very annoying. So I went looking for a clear storage solution. (With ADHD, it's out of sight, out of mind.) I finally found something that might work. The length and width were perfect. It was a little taller than I wanted, but it was worth a try and I didn't have to buy a package of ten. I could buy one. Perfect.

Then I made a small mistake. Instead of taking overnight delivery, I said, sure, deliver it with my Subscribe and Save order. I don't need it right away.

And then the storage box arrived and it was high quality. It fit on my cart perfectly. I loaded up the items on the top shelf of the washi tape cart into it. Absolutely perfect. Well, almost. They sides were a little high, but I decided I could live with that.

Did you see what I did there?

I bought the box to handle the problem on the second shelf of the everyday cart. I used the box for the top shelf of the washi tape cart.

That's right, in the span of four days, I forgot what I ordered that storage bin for and promptly used it for the wrong thing. I realized that when I tried to get a marker out of the middle shelf of the everyday cart and had to fight my way through the paper that's leaning over.

Sometimes my brain can be frustrating. I looked at the storage bin filled with items on another cart and it worked so well that instead of emptying it out, I ordered another bin. This time I chose overnight delivery since it was free.