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...