is so way more than doing nothing at all.
It used to be that I was convinced that if I couldn’t do it from beginning to end 100% guaranteed that it wasn’t worth
doing at all.
By the time your eyelids are no longer what they used to be, enough things change that you get it.
This morning I started to clean my house. I got the cupboards washed and the walls washed and two toilets on the way to better and photographs dusted and most of the floor vacuumed.
The hardest part is all that shiny-ness just points out what isn’t done.
Before I started, the dust on what wasn’t dusted didn’t stand up and shout the way it’s doing now.
The trick is to see it as a good thing.
Instead of throwing up my hands when I haven’t started working on anything but cleaning and it’s nearly 2 and I could go until 8 washing the refrigerator and the insides of the window sill and the shower curtain when I find it, I say “that’s good.”
And my mother’s favorite, “tomorrow is another day.”

Do the same with cooking. Buy a roast beef, salt it all over and ease it into the oven with a quartered tomato and a quartered onion, a few garlic cloves, a few thyme sprigs, parsley sprigs and a good pour of olive oil. If you have a schnitzel of red wine left from one thing or the other, pour that over as well. Let it go at 350 degrees. In a pan under the beef, do the same thing you did to the beef with cut and peeled potatoes.
Forget planting the peas, growing the peas, picking the peas, simmering the peas in a tiny bit of cream w/pearled onions. Use frozen.

Cut six plums into wedges, sugar them up, and turn them out into a pan. Rub half a stick of butter with 1/2 cup of sugar and 1/2 cup of flour into bits. Give it a teeny weeny of cinnamon. Crumble it over the plums and bake in the same 350 oven when the beef comes out.

Sweep whatever’s on the table into a bucket and get someone else to set it.