The week started with days where the ambient temperature reached a high in the 70s, dipped on Wednesday to the teens, then rose again the rest of the week. The expectation for first week in March is highs in the 30s and 40s, so it seems unseasonably warm.
Creamed crumbles on toast
I don’t have many meals derived from Mother’s cooking. As important as cooking has become to me, I can count on one hand the number of dishes I now make that she did, too. One of those is variously called chipped beef on toast or creamed beef on toast. Mother made this for Father as a reminiscence of Southern cooking in which he came up. I don’t use beef in our kitchen, yet I made this for breakfast one day. I use vegetarian recipe crumbles as a meat substitute.
Saute half cup of finely diced onions in two tablespoons of butter and add one finely chopped clove of garlic. Season with salt and pepper. Add dried home made hot pepper powder. Add a cup of recipe crumbles and cook until thawed from the freezer. Add two tablespoons of all purpose flour and combine everything while on medium low heat. Add one cup of milk (cow milk or oat milk, whatever is the kitchen standard) and combine. Lower the heat and cook until the mixture thickens. Toast and cut into 3/4-inch squares two slices of bread. Pour the creamed crumble mixture evenly over the toast and enjoy.
Tracking writing
I edited the first ten chapters of my book. I created a spreadsheet to track what I did and how the daily word count changed. The fact that I am now including numbered chapters is a revelation. It helps organize topics in a way I hadn’t considered. I now gather topics from different places in the narrative over a span of years under a single header. It helps reduce the amount of duplication that plagued me from the cut and paste method of composition with which I began. I am satisfied I made progress last week.
Email rabbit hole
I have email files beginning in 1999. There are hundreds of thousands of stored emails and I don’t plan to read them all. When I begin a session of email reading, I become lost for hours in a rabbit hole of forking paths. For example, the emails I wrote and received about updating the county plan for dealing with a contagious disease epidemic seem prescient in light of the coronavirus pandemic ten years later. This research will yield a paragraph, maybe two in my chapter about the coronavirus pandemic which closes the book.
What I seek the most is emails from friends and family to use in other parts of the narrative. Facts are recorded with dates attached to them and they help evoke memories of that time. The trouble I see is advancing technology may render some of those files obsolete. For now, the current version of Microsoft Outlook opens all the saved files, yet I’m anxious to go through them even if it would be better to wait until I’m writing those parts of the narrative.
Publication
I decided to publish Part I of the autobiography first. The narrative goes through finishing graduate school and taking work at the university where my spouse and I met. I was 30 years old on our wedding day: a clean breaking point for the narrative. The second part of the book will be more difficult to write because there is so much material to condense. I delay that challenge by deciding to finish part I this year, God willing.
Summary
It was a good week. Hopefully increased garden tasks can be added to my life without compromising the writing. March brings the pressure of spring and I am ready for it. On Friday, March 1, we saw the first Robin in our yard, along with another flock of smaller birds. Spring is definitely coming.
Journey Home 
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