Eggsactly No Motivation

The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell. --Zora Neale Hurston

It's that time of year when abundance comes to Vancouver Island. Farms have fresh strawberries, the fishermen are bringing in cod and tuna, the flowers are bursting into bloom...

And eggs. I dunno why, but I seem to be getting offers for free eggs from here there and everywhere.

I gave in the other day and accepted a flat of 36 eggs, only to discover that the hubby had brought home a couple dozen from the grocery store that same day. I mean, we go through a fair number of eggs around here, but 60 eggs are about two dozen too many, no matter how long they last in the fridge.

I set about trying to work through them this weekend. Yesterday, I made a quiche with filo pastry, inspired by a video by Jamie Oliver I watched the other day. I cooked up some turkey bacon, shredded leeks, and zucchini and tossed in some fresh basil, oregano, and mint along with some pureed sundried tomatoes. It turned out really well, and I really like the crispiness of the filo pastry as a change from the regular shortcrust pastry. Six eggs down:

This morning, I contemplated all of the recipes I'd heard of that use a lot of eggs, but in the end, I decided to go with a recipe I found online for a 12 Egg Pound Cake. It's a bit of a misnomer because it actually makes two cakes, but I was all for smashing through another dozen. I got a bit nervous as I was mixing it up. Twelve eggs plus all of the other ingredients turns out to be quite a volume:

But apart from worrying about the batter overflowing in the mixing bowl, it was a relatively simple recipe. And yes, now I have two cakes to get through. I brought a few slices over to a neighbour and I think I can probably offload some at work, but a little extra cake is probably not a bad problem to have sometimes:

Egg total: eighteen. And then I used four more for omelettes for lunch. Twenty-two down. And it's only Sunday.

I haven't just been juggling eggs in the kitchen. I've been wandering around the garden looking at my vegetables and watching as the red rhododendrons that grow outside our front window go through their annual bloom. I find it so satisfying because they set their buds in the autumn and then hang onto them all winter until the time is just right. I look at them every morning as I eat my breakfast, and when I see the buds begin to swell, I start to get really excited. They do not disappoint:

And the hydrangeas that I over-pruned a couple of autumns ago have come back this year in an amazing show of buds that are just beginning to bloom. I feel so grateful that the garden fairies have not held my over-eager pruning methods against me and that they have allowed the flowers to come back so well after a disappointing show last year:

And the yarn... right, yes... the yarn...

I'm finding it hard to get the motivation to work on this project right now. It's the first time I've ever worked a blanket in squares, and I'm finding it difficult to keep the momentum up. Honestly, I'm finding it more fun to scroll on my phone than to pick up one of these suckers. I've thought about taking a break and moving on to something else, but something tells me that if I put this down now, I will never pick it up again:

I think part of the problem is that I have very little confidence in the colour-matching decisions I've made. I think some of them are turning out really nice, but others are a bit iffy. I'm hoping that once I've got them all assembled, it'll just be the joyous outflow of colours I am imagining in my head. I mean, if I wanted an easy time, I could have made a single-colour blanket, but how interesting would that be?

Except... I'm not finding the squares particularly interesting at the moment. I'm not sure what to do about that, except to keep on going. Maybe I need a goal to get through more of the yarn. I mean, if I can get through twenty-two eggs in two days, what's a few more squares?

How weird that I am more motivated by eggs than by yarn. What strange times indeed.

I'm off to sort out dinner. No, we're not having eggs. But I betcha I'll get through another dozen by the next blogpost...