I had planned to get all the stuff done in one day

Unsurprisingly, that didn’t really work out.

The plan was to make pizza from scratch (new recipe), clean the house, change the sheets, go walking/running, take a shower, set up my bullet journal for October, write a newsletter and a blog post on my author blog, watch ‚Columbo‘ and C-drama and go to bed on time anyway.

Well

The good stuff first:

I did proofread book three for half an hour and I really like it. Pizza was made, exercise happened, as did the shower. I attended the Zoom call, spent time with my family and made progress on the bullet journal (while on Zoom, don’t tell anyone).

My morning went pretty well but I did not shape nice little dough balls before breakfast. I decided that three hours of proofing at room temperature had to be enough.

I started the next step on my fingerless mittens and was forcefully reminded why I have a rule that I don’t start complicated knitting stuff while talking with someone. I’ll have to find a bit of time today to figure out if I went wrong and where.

I made doughballs and did an astounding amount of dirty dishes. The boy had brought them downstairs the night before saying that he had been so proud to bring them downstairs before I was doing the dishes but, well, it was a holiday and I did them earlier.

I rushed out the door. I had thought about maybe shortening my run but I didn’t really want to. The weather was perfect and for once I felt like I might be making progress eventually:

I came back fifteen minutes before lunchtime to a kitchen full of salad ingredients and a cranky husband. The oven was already preheated and my husband was lamenting the waste of energy.

I went into overdrive and chopped carrots, spring onion and salad, then went on to form pizzas. It all went pretty well until the point where it was time to transfer them to the peel and from there to the oven. Here is what we got:

So, as you can see, the crust is looking fine, the shape of the pizza is a disaster and therefore the middle is not quite as thin as I would have liked. Also, way too much basil, not good.

While we were making the pizza the oven was stinking to heaven and my husband feared we’d all get cancer from the fumes. After a lengthy discussion we decided trying to make pizza from scratch in this way is definitely not worth it.

The we started eating. I mean, it definitely could have been better, but.

Even all smooshed together and a little cold because with that pizza stone we can only ever make one pizza at a time, that pizza still tasted better than even the one from the nice pizza restaurant in town.

I mean, we still agreed we’ll buy frozen, but. You see our dilemma.

My husband thinks the dough is too moist. I think it is mainly a skill issue. We’re probably both right. We will not attempt pizza again soon.

I mean, you need to start 1-3 days in advance, you make the dough, you have it sitting there, cluttering your fridge for all that time, on the day where you want to make it you have to take it out 3-8 hours in advance and shape some balls, then you make the sauce and cut the cheese and such (pretty easy), preheat the oven as hot as it can get with that pizza stone, do the pressing and stretching and shaping ritual, put sauce and cheese and whatnot on top, you start thinking it’s going pretty well, then you realize the pizza is sticking to the table, you transfer it to the peel anyway, it looks kind of square instead of round but that will be okay, you open the oven, you do the little wiggling maneuver, and smoosh and oops.

Three times in a row.

(I’ve been using tutorials by this guy, this time. The disaster is definitely not his fault.)

And yet. It tastes really good. But it is very stressful.

Thus ended the successful part of the day, well, more or less.

I played some Genshin Impact after lunch and leveled up even though my controller kept losing the connection, I ate some chocolate, I tried making myself clean, or do the dishes, or get the two packages ready but failed.

Then it was time for my weekly writer Zoom.

The day before one of the writers had sent a message that she wanted to talk about a certain topic. I looked forward to it. I even watched the video she sent even though I have already watched it several times but I love me some homework.

Guess what we didn’t talk about yesterday? Come on, guess.

It was just a nice general chat which is fine but having a topic would have been so much better.

Then it was time to watch ‚Columbo‘. The plan was to eat frozen soft pretzels. Then I opened the oven and removed the pizza stone.

I can now tell you exactly why the kitchen smelled so burnt.

There is a piece of melted, charcoal black cheese on the bottom of our oven that can’t be scraped off easily.

So, no pretzels. We were all a little disappointed. We also were almost out of bread so I volunteered to eat crisp bread.

We did have some Oktoberfest beer because I had mentioned that might be nice and my husband went out and bought some.

The ‚Columbo‘ episode was fabulous. Really, really good. („Old fashioned murder“ from season 6)

After that it was time to finally tackle the dishes. So I ate some chocolate, read a bit, went on social media, did Duolingo, start writing this post, brushed my teeth and then finally put the kitchen back in order.

I even wrote a note to myself that the oven still needs deep-cleaning.

Which leaves me with another day off where I’ll try to put the house into a semblance of order and get myself sorted.