How full is your plate?

Earlier this week, over supper, I earnestly lectured a newly retired friend, reminding her she is now retired with all that implies and she should stop working so hard to build her free lance career. Spend more time doing what you want, I urged, as though I was the sage of retirement. Spend more time with your husband. She protested she was doing what she liked, and I said just too much of it.
Sometimes--frequently?--our words come back to bite us. Today I was feeling a bit better about the chili book but still struggling. I did make progress and could see it begin to take some shape But when I'm supposedly devoting my writing time to that project, I somehow got involved in not one but two new projects. A librarian friend sent me a piece soliciting articles about teaching women to write about their lives. A snap, I thought, and whisked off a proposal--it was accepted barring review and is due in 60 days. Aftr all I've done that class several times, thrice within the last year. Then someone asked me to present a paper on writing historical fiction for young adults at the annual meeting of the Texas State Historical Society in El Paso in early March--Alamo anniversary weekend. Getting to El Paso is beyond me for a lot of reasons, but since the programmers had a last-minute withdrawal and needed help I offered to write the paper and send it if someone else would read it. I expected "Thanks but no thanks." Instead the answer was "Great. I'll talk to Fran and get back to you." That one too should be a snap, but those things that you think are a snap never turn out to be so once you start on them. I'm not abandoning chili right away but when I get definitve word on these othr projects, I'll do just that. Maybe that will give me perspective.
Very cold in North Texas today--Scooby has been asleep in his bed all afternoon, and I can't get him to go out to eat his dinner. Yet he can't stay in all night without a potty trip outside--I'll work on that in a bit. Had a good lunch with Melinda at Nona Tata today--my favorite braseola with shaved grana cheese and a good vinaigrette and that spoonful of really good vinegar-style potato salad. Tonight was not, I decided, a night to settle for tuna salad and hummus, so I made chicken divan--turns out, since I'm eating small servings, I made two servings. But I simply roasted a half chicken breast, steamed some broccoli, and covered it with a white sauce--the requisite butter and flour paste, chicken broth, a touch of white wine, and a tiny tiny splash of whole cream. Then put Parmesan over it and baked it--delicious! I could have eaten the whole thing but I'm restraining myself.
Hmmm. Back to chili.

Reading is addictive

I've lost myself in reading lately, and not even the mysteries that I constantly consume. But I have so many books I want to read that I'm ignoring other things I should be doing--like working on my new novel. It started with a book I am to review for the Dallas Morning News, titled 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Families in One Tenement. Set in the lower East Side of New York City, it spans the 1860s through the Depression. I won't be a spoiler for the review, except to say that it chronicles the way various cultures--German, Irish, Jewish, and Italian--contributed to American foodways and in turn, the habits they assimilatede from American culture. I read it avidly and had the review ready a month before it was due.
Then I became probably the last person I know to read Katherine Stockton's The Help, about the relationships between white women and their black maids in Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1960s. It's hard for me to believe some of the white women, and I thought perhaps they were caricatures, but friends who lived in the South assure me it's true. Stockton, who grew up in Jackson, turned the material into a riveting novel, and although I ached for the black women, the one who gave me the most pain was a little girl named Mae Mobley who thought her nanny was her real mother because the mother never gave her any love or attention. When the maid is fired, for becoming part of an imaginary tell-all book, she walks away hearing Mae Mobley's anguished screams. It's a book you can't read without being moved, and I spent almost all of last weekend reading it.
The Help made me think of GeeGee, the black nanny we had in Chicago when I was a toddler. Relations between her and my mother were much more cordial, though I can remember Mom recalling her amazement (and disapproval) when GeeGee let me eat four eggs for breakfast one morning (maybe that's why I didn't like them for years!). I asked my brother the other day when GeeGee left and how old I was, but he just shook his head and said he didn't now. "They're so many questions I didn't ask and now wish I had," he said. I remember GeeGee coming back once for a visit and how happy we were to see her. In retrospect, I wonder if the death of my younger sister at six months (probably SIDS, though I was told she had a heart defect) didn't contribute to GeeGee's leaving.
Now, I'm reading an advance copy of Spilling the Beans, by Clarissa Dickson Wright, one of BBC's Two Fat Ladies who wheeled about the countryside in a motorcycle and sidecar cooking at various locations and gatherings. If you ever watched the show--and millions did--the picture on the cover will be familiar: a dumpy, slightly rumpled English woman in a  funny hat with a big smile on her face. The inside of the book reveals a far different and intriguing story. I'm reviewing this one for the Story Circle Network, so don't want to be a spoiler there either.
Speaking of the Story Circle Network, Beth Knudson and I are going to coordinate a class on Writing Your Life Story, based on the principles of the Story Circle Network beginning in early May, You don't have to join the network to be part of the class, but there is a fee. And we're going to ask everyone to participate in pot-luck snacks and wine. If you'd like more information, e-mail me at j.alter@tcu.edu. And if you're interested, you might search for Story Circle Network on Google. It's an international organization designed to help women tell their life stories. I've taught the class twice for the TCU community class program.
A food note: I've had a delicious day and still come out ahead on points. For lunch I had a tuna salad plate at a place I rarely go--it was really good, came with a quarter hard boiled egg, a bit of tomato, one thin slice of avocado, and a fruit cup. Tonight Betty and I went to Nonna Tata (I was prepared and took a bottle of wine and two plastic wine glasses), and I had braseola (the Italian cured beef version of prosciutto) dressed in lemon and olive oil, with grana cheese, and a vinegar based German salad. One of my favorite meals.
Okay, back to Spilling the Beans.