Category Archives: Spirituality

Beltane Bake Day AKA Beltane Bakefest 2008!

For Beltane Bake Day 2008, I chose to bake challah.

It felt slightly heretical making whole wheat challah, but making bread with only white flour feels wrong now.

1/2 cup milk
2 eggs
1 egg yolk
3 tablespoons butter
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup white flour
1/4 cup honey
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons active dry yeast

1 egg white
1 tablespoon milk

I put the first set of ingredients in the bread machine on the dough cycle (the mixing, kneading, and first rise) then removed it when the cycle was over. I divided it into three, rolled each section into a rope, and braided it. I put it on the baking sheet, covered it, let it rise for half an hour, brushed it with the egg white/milk mixture, and baked it for 30 minutes at 350 degrees F. When it came out I brushed it with butter too. (Obviously you could do this traditionally as well, proofing the yeast and mixing everything by hand.) I might use a bit more yeast next time.

This was dinner for me. Two huge slabs of it, dripping with butter. It was also breakfast, and will probably be lunch. A thick slice heats up nicely in the microwave at nineish seconds.

I’ve really been enjoying everyone’s pictures and posts about their baking! Haven’t baked yet? You have till Saturday at midnight. No idea what I’m talking about? Check out the original post!

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 41,688
New words today: 1,491

I combined two chapters, moved a few pages around to other chapters to create better flow, talked about ethics and composting (not the ethics of composting, which is something entirely different). Is that all I did? It feels like I did nothing. I could have done so much more, but I just can’t focus or get into the damn thing or something. Gah. I should be happy I’m finding even fifteen hundred words’ worth of things to say these days.

I am currently struggling with the suspicion that this is all much too vague. It’s never as bad as I think it is, which ought to be reassuring.

I really, really wish I could somehow shift my productive time so that I’m not in the swing of things when the boy comes home.

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 40,197
New words today: 2,724

More trying to define spirituality, as well as writing about needfires and smooring. I’m not sure how I got that many words down today; it certainly didn’t feel like that many when I was digging for them. All I knew is that I really, really wanted to break 40K.

This was a bad day in terms of physical pain.

I have to fly to pick the boy up at five.

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 35,100
New words today: 1,706

Altars, shrines, oil lamps. Lots of oil lamps. There will be even more on oil lamps, because one of the exercises involves making your own as a spiritual focus. I love them.

I got an extra hour of work in because HRH came home from work early to fight through traffic and poorly ploughed streets to fetch the boy and bring him home so that I wouldn’t have to. Bless him.

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 33,394
New words today: 2,356

Hearth deities and spirits, mostly, and four pages of automatic writing (which needs to be severely rewritten and inserted in the first and second chapters) about the concept of home-based spirituality (like what it is, and why it’s important). These are what I’ve been struggling with: they’re key to the book, and I understand what they are, but it’s hard to put it into words. It’s a start.

I’ve also been copying files from my hard drive onto my new external hard drive (500 GB! — more than six times the size of my primary hard drive!) as a backup. It now houses all my music files, plus backups of my photos and all my documents. It’s been taking a long, long time, because my USB ports on the computer itself are old enough that they’re first generation, which means my super-speedy external hard drive is being restricted to the speed of the very-not-speedy old USB ports. The copying has been taking up a lot of the computer’s brain, so things have been very slow in general today. It’s taken three days overall to copy all the stuff I’ve got.

I received three books in the mail today, all of which I have been waiting for for one reason or another. Much will be the curling up to read and make notes.