14 March 2006

when homework looks good

today had been one of those lousy homework days. i'd been working on it sort of, but it was going slow, and i'd look for a distraction every five minutes. after having spent the afternoon getting little done, i prayed and hoped that i'd be a bit more excited about homework. and i think i got my answer.

i would say that i'm a pretty good cook. and i make good pizza. and today, having moved around the frozen pizza crusts in the freezer a kazillion times already, i decided it was high time to make pizza. so i cooked some sauce and put the dough on a greased cookie tray (if i cook it a bit ahead of time, i can put extra sauce on it). checking the dough ten minutes later, i'd noticed it'd shrunk and separated some. so i put some flour on it. not much help. so i took it out and put a whole lot of flour with it. it still had a bit of a funny texture, but looked this time like it might actually get crunchy in the oven. the pizza making process continued relatively well (i'd added a smaller crust from the freezer and some leftover bread pieces to the pile) until i took it out of the oven. as i start taking out the tray with the small pizza and 'pizza breads,' i realize that i'm about to burn myself, readjust the hotpan holder, and the small pizza slides off the tray and lands top down on the bottom of the oven. as i mumble a few nasty words to myself, my brain processes that, no, i can't just scoop it off the bottom, and the smoke from the singed cheese is going to set off the fire alarm (which produces a nasty noise in the entire apartment building). after opening the sliding door and covering the fire alarm, we sat down to eat. my roommate had the pizza breads and i the remains of the small pizza (i hate wasting food - and it wasn't bad with a little extra sauce).

then we pulled out the pizza with the slightly suspicious dough. and it looked great. and tasted light and flaky. perfect for a pie. kind of funky on a pizza. [and that explains why the dough seemed a bit strange, but still vaguely familiar - at the food pantry where we get half of our food, i'd managed to pick up pie crusts instead of pizza crusts!].

my roommate summed it up nicely: i'm just having a bad pizza day.

when a glass broke with little assistance from me (and i still had to clean the oven), i realized that my evening homework - jotting down sermon ideas and looking through ugartiic textbooks - was just what i needed. it contains nothing that can be broken or dropped. and that it's on the non-adventurous side sounds kind of nice.

this wasn't exactly how i would have answered my prayer of being more motivated to do homework...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

after reading your post i feel motivated too.

...must ...stay ...at ...computer