Rainy Day Yields Inspiration

Today is the third day of rain here in the Bay Area, and I am finding myself rather renewed. I spent most of Thursday working on prepping for teaching Annie sewing as well as working on a special order that I hope to finish up today. Friday was kind of an exercise in frustration and disappointment. Annie and I hoped to make cheese, but we could not find the starter and rennet to save our lives. We licked our culinary adventure wounds and went back to the sewing room to work on aprons. The sewing went well, and soon Annie will have a new apron!

I went to class at Fat Chance Belly Dance this past Saturday and had a great time. Now that I am performing at Rakkasha with the group of students at the studio, I have more rehearsals and classes to attend. I also have signed up to do the student salon, so there is a lot of dance to participate in lately. The neatest thing was getting to attend a class taught by Carolena, the founder of the dance form. It was in a way a huge dream come true. I know it is corny, but she was one of my biggest inspirations when I started dancing. The class was so interesting, and I got so much out of the session. The rain showed up later that evening, and it was a welcomed thing. It made me sit down and just relax a bit and let myself rest. I was pretty wiped out from the dance sessions and all the fun of running around with Annie.

The rest of the holiday weekend was filled with reordering and picking up the house. The china cabinet was reorganized and reconstructed to make it much more functional. I also worked on my embroidery project that has spanned many, many years. I hope to get it finished in 2010, but it may be a stretch.

Today I am feeling like I have lots of energy to get things done despite a bad night's sleep. I am going to go and make a spice cake after this entry as well as finishing up the special order. I also want to dust the house and clean up in general. I am also making my final determinations as to the balcony garden for this year. I hope to make the order for all the seeds today or tomorrow. After all of this, I want to work on making a database to find recipes more easily in our collection of Cook's magazines. I am tired of going through each issue to find the one recipe that I need. Hopefully that will help. Well I need to stay with this wave of inspiration while I still have it. Spice cake pictures and recipe review tomorrow!