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Today feels like a nervous breakdown in the making. Not for the family so much as for the anticipation of it, and I am on edge and jumpy and clumsy.

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*breathes* Baking makes me calmer because I have to concentrate. Family has not yet arrived; the cake is out of the oven, the bread has been set out to rise, I still have to do glaze and muffins, and then this evening I'm doing macaroni and cheese, again. (I do not know what is with my macaroni and cheese craving this year; I have never craved mac and cheese this much before.)

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Huh. I think I can tell how stressed I am by how much I read food blogs or cookbooks: the more stressed, the more I obsess over cooking or baking. And I really want to try out canning! My mother cans, and we're buying Many Many Blueberries tomorrow, so I should be able to try it out. Also there's this blueberry syrup recipe in the latest issue of Food + Wine I want to try.

I am also eyeing this book with fascination. Look, I read too much Stirling, okay? I am reasonably reassured by the fact that I do know how to do some things from Ye Olden Times. I can knit, and I can bake -- I even, in theory, know how to bake bread if we run out of yeast by using a sourdough starter, but I kept forgetting to make starter this summer and I am leaving in a month, so. Except I shall never be able to be truly self-sufficient because the idea of owning chickens makes me cry: see, my phobia of birds.

Also, the Family is not yet here, but should be soon, and soon I must begin the epic macaroni and cheese. (I am doubling my usual recipe.) Cake and bread baked; will do muffins either in the evening or the morning, depending on when I wake up.

Anyway, yes, me + stress = food blogs + cookbooks. When I am not as stressed, it's knitting and knitting blogs. FASCINATING.