In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been very slow in posting my next ping-pong story. I started off strong, pounding out over eight-hundred words in the first day without knowing what I was doing. After that, I spent a few days planning and ended up with what I thought was something and somewhere interesting. I puzzled out a few of the more clever aspects, including some ideas that sounded wonderful when I jotted notes, but turned out beyond my writing skills.

After the first week of inspiration and writing, I was over a thousand words and working my way toward the finished product. Which is, of course, when I came to a grinding halt. As I managed a paragraph or sometimes a few words at a time, I found myself reading and rereading the words, not moving forward, but pedaling backwards to add an article or remove a word, not wanting to know what would happen later in the story. My narrator is a slightly mad woman, and because of that, I find the writing a bit more difficult than usual. I need to craft each sentence to keep the voice true, and by doing so, I spend more time concentrating on the words (and editing the voice) than the story, and the story suffers, moving in starts and stops.

That’s enough of that. I pounded out a few more paragraphs and am calling it a night on the writing front. It’ll get done when it gets done—which, I’m afraid to say, couldn’t be soon enough.

Doolies spent her first May weekend in in the Castle. She’ll be here throughout the month, and it’s wonderful not driving her to the airport on Sunday night. As you can tell by the photographs, we cooked a Shabbot dinner on Friday night. I’m not sure where my Jewish studies are taking me, but I’m willing to experiment here and there with what it has to offer. I’ll hopefully write more about it when I get around to writing more about it (I know I have to stop promising and not delivering). We spent a wonderful weekend unpacking Doolies’s boxes and moving Doolies in to the Castle. There is now Doolies evidence on every floor and in every room. It’s a nice touch from my usual stark taste.

I baked Banana bread tonight. I’m not sure what inspired me, but the loaf is cooling on a rack in the kitchen. It’s too late to eat tonight, but I’m expecting a yummy (if hopefully not too sweet) breakfast of yogurt and bread. And, no, Chuck, I’m not becoming obsessed with breads like some people. But I thought it would be fun and it was relatively easy. I will have to experiment with the ingredients once I taste this one. I was inspired by a pumpkin bread we ate at a Shabbot dinner last Friday (I have to find out what they used instead of butter in the recipe—probably some sort of oil).

Again I’m going to have to whip out the “enough” word. I’m sounding way too domestic in this entry. It’s been a wonderfully long weekend and I’m sad to see it pass. Luckily, Doolies and I have many more weekends ahead, and then after a brief month apart, even more weekends to look forward to. Here’s to finishing stories and beginning lives.