I beat the stress with creativity

I recovered from my adventure last Thursday and Friday pretty well. As you may know, I'm not a great traveller. It wears me out, even when I'm travelling on my own and know where I'm going.

Anyway, probably the main reason I recovered well was that it backed onto a quiet weekend. And on Saturday I had a "creative" day. Look at all I did. It didn't wear me out at all, it energised me!

Sneaking a look at the chocolate chip cookies in the
cupboard. Got to look quickly, or they'll all be gone!

Love these! Snickerdoodles. The name gets an award to start with. But I'd forgotten about these particular type of biscuits until someone baked them for the Thrift Shop workers a couple of weeks ago and it took me right back to childhood. When I came home, I went searching in my recipes, and lo and behold, I have my mum's recipe. So I made these. They taste and smell wonderful! Thanks Mum.

Snickerdoodles—coated in cinnamon and sugar.

This was also a triumph for dinner. For the entire time we've lived in Japan we've made home-made pizzas using a yeast base mixed in our bread maker. Unfortunately our family is out-growing the breadmaker. Meaning, the amount of dough it can produce is only barely enough to feed us for one round of pizza. (Reason we make our own: bought pizzas are ridiculously expensive. The only other time we have pizza at home is generally Costco pizza.)

So, inspired by my friend Rhoda, I decided to try making a larger amount of pizza dough from scratch. It really isn't too hard and certainly the 10 minutes of hard kneading could be quite therapeutic.

My middle son helped with the toppings. He loved working
in the kitchen with me and I enjoyed his company. Bonus!

And my non-baking achievement: sleeping bag covers. Both these sleeping bags were bought second-hand at Thrift Shop a year or two ago. Neither had covers, only plastic bags that were rapidly dying. So, I bought some material and made covers. Simple!

Perhaps the covers cost me more than the bags, though!

The bonus was the cord on the blue bag. The cord was recycled from the plastic bag that had carried the sleeping bag before. I just love the colour contrast with the blue.

Confession: I didn't finish the second one till Sunday.

I love creating, especially very practical things that don't require a lot of fuss. The weekend was the perfect foil to the stress of the week preceding it.