I did something yesterday that made me unwind so utterly and completely and purge so much tension that I felt the kind of exhausted you feel only after you’ve cried for 30 minutes straight. I won’t go into detail other than to say my eyes only briefly teared up, and what I did was neither illegal nor unhealthy.

Most people wouldn’t consider post-crying exhaustion to be a good thing, but trust me, it was a very good thing. It was an emotion far different than the tension, stress and anxiety that has dominated so much of my life lately, and so it was welcome.

I’m trying to milk the non-tension/stress/anxiety as long as I can this weekend to balance out the 10 hours I’ll be working tomorrow. I call it my weekend of quietude. The Modern Love Machine is out of town, as our most of my gal pals, so I’ve spent my day off today doing things I find restorative: creative writing, cleaning and cooking. I don’t know how the folks behind so many of the blogs I read find so much time for these things on an everyday basis. Even on a good week of work, there just. isn’t. any. time.

My posts, now with more photos. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Creative writing: Let’s just say that was work-related but was enjoyable nonetheless, and we’ll leave it at that.

Cleaning: I mopped. I absolutely hate mopping. I hate mopping more than doing dishes, eating mayo, cleaning the shower, finding dog poop on the rug or working on a Labor Day while everyone else has off and is tweeting about their awesome cookouts.I feel like mopping is merely pushing dirty water around on a floor. We have a rusty brown colored floor, so it hides dirty pretty dang well, but it doesn’t hide the sticky drips of stuff that are a product of a well-loved kitchen. I absolutely could not stand walking barefoot through the kitchen anymore, and if there’s anything I dislike more than mopping its having to wear shoes at home when it’s not cold. What I like is the sense of accomplishment once it’s done.

Cooking: I’ve been on a cooking binge lately, which can probably be blamed on the cooler temperatures. Nothing makes me want to turn on the oven or stovetop more than fall weather. Today I made the Pioneer Woman’s quesadillas de camarones for like the third time in the past week and a half, except minus the camarones and plus some pollo because it’s what I had. Most of y’all know this already, but damn, that Pioneer Woman can cook. Those quesadillas do not disappoint.

I also finally took a stab at Irish soda bread, a staple of our Irish honeymoon. If you’ve been to Ireland, you know that bed and breakfasts exist every five feet there and that every single one of them offers the full Irish breakfast with a side of soda bread. If you haven’t been, the soda bread is a quickbread that’s inherently sweet but punctuated with the pungent pinch of caraway. It comes in both a dark brown version and a more yellowy version, which was the one I ended up making.

I got my recipe out of Joy of Cooking, the cooking encyclopedia, if you will, which was kind of like this, but not quite the same measurements, made in a loaf pan rather than a cake pan and made without the raisins, because I didn’t once have bread with raisins in it in Ireland.

After it’s completely cooled, you slice it thickly and spread it with the best quality butter you can find, which still won’t be as good of butter as you can get in Ireland.

I should mention that all of this — the mopping, the quesadilla-ing and the soda breading — was all done with the windows open and a 68-degree breeze floating in. If you can bottle that up and preserve it for year-round use, that would be optimal.