An Arizona Cheesehead's Thoughts

Ever since I moved into my new house with its huge kitchen, I've been trying to figure out something to host that would take advantage of the space. That thought kernel and my obsession with The Great British Bakeoff, including the holiday specials, led me to the decision to host a cookie decorating day. Cue Cookie Monster with your earworm for the day. Because I'm me, I went way overboard. Nothing succeeds like excess is one of my favorite sayings and it was truly excessive. I bought lots of supplies. Not shown:  extra piping bags, gel colors, food pens, more toppings that a friend brought, plastic bottles, new cookie cutters, cooling racks, and a partridge in a pear tree. I did limit the group to just six because I wasn't sure how much space we would need for our flowing creativity. That was my only reasonable action in this whole experience. I offered to bake the cookies ahead of time and spent one Sunday night with the oven using an old family recipe ...

We had a “Welcome to the team” lunch for our newest colleague and I was in charge of the icebreakers per usual. One of the questions I asked was, “What’s your dream job?” The caveat is you can’t pick your current job. That’s just a suckup move anyway. Two people answered they wanted to work with horses (ugh), one said police officer, two said chefs of some sort, another said electrical engineer and one said the answer I had prepared. Writer. Which is laughable in a way because the only writing I’ve done is for our newsletter and (small) pearls of wisdom emails from the President (that’s me) of Parrot Heads in Paradise. I started thinking about what was stopping me from doing any real writing. I couldn’t come up with any good reasons. Oh, I had reasons, of course, but not good ones. Can you legitimately say you want to be a writer when you don’t actually write? I might have well have said I wanted to be an Olympic athlete. Both seem just as likely when you’re making zero effort. I also...