My grand hopes that I would post pictures today of all my completed projects were, by all appearances, wildly over-ambitious. Brainiac distracted me from my planned achievements with a day-long outing on Saturday, us and the kids, exploring new areas, cavorting on new playgrounds and making new connections. I am always happy surrender to his occasional zeal for aimless meandering, knowing that when it strikes he will take great delight in bringing me to as yet unknown (to me) garden center, used book store or fabric store (sometimes all three). Saturday brought a visit to a Revolutionary War-era house, beautifully restored and now for sale, in addition to other sundry delights and I just never quite got to doing whatever it was that I had meant to do.

What it was that I had meant to do included finishing a dress for Entropy Girl, made out of a beautiful toile, blue and cream, with a scene of pastoral childhood of the kind that is usually found only in books and consists of kids fishing, flying kites, dancing around a Maypole, that sort of thing. It has made, as I thought it would, a very sweet non-fussy dress that I hope now to finish tonight and which the recipient has flat out refused to accept. No matter, for the truth is that I made the dress for me, even if I have long since left size 3T behind, and my daughter wearing it is not required for my complete joy in its creation. Nice, but not required.

And then there is the unmade Sun Bread, from a recipe found in the book of the same name wherein a town of clever animals convince the sun to make an appearance by baking bright yellow bread to relieve a long, gray winter. I've been begged for Sun Bread for weeks (to be served alongside cherry and pineapple upside down cake conjured from Eight Animals Bake a Cake) and, well, perhaps tonight is the night.

It appears that someone at my local library has recently developed an interest in food issues outside of how to cook dinners in thirty minutes or less or creating a gour-may meal with a carefully chosen selection of boxes and cans. I know this because the complete works of Morgan Spurlock have materialized on the New Arrivals shelf, alongside any number of items by Michael Pollan and something called The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, which I could not put on my wait list fast enough (alongside another new offering, Food Not Lawns). Somebody at the acquisitions desk, it seems to me, is trying to make a point.

In addition to essay and theory a number of cookery books have also appeared, books which focus on what I think of as real cooking of the kind that my great-grandmother might have done. Among these are a number of canning books and I was thrilled, before my overdue fines became too high for me to do so, to check them all out at a go.

As it turns out only one of them really interested me, Frances Bissel's Preserving Nature's Bounty. And even it I was prepared to dislike upon reading the author's declaration that the book was about "[using] what friends might bring you from their country home." (Note to self: acquire better class of friends, see also: country homes.) In the end I came to appreciate the books despite the annoying introductory material because the recipes are unique and straightforward and sound really delicious. The organization is good, too, with recipes pertaining to a given food item gathered together - the mango section, for example, has mango ketchup (!), mango lime jam (!!) and mango salsa all together instead of all the jams in one place, all the salsas in another and all the ketchups off by themselves somewhere. I love this because if one finds a great buy on mangoes it will be easy to find things to do with mangoes without having to page through the entire book looking for mango recipes to compare. Genius.

When not reading canning or food theory books, I've been gardening with the kids. Spring gardening in particular is great with children because so much of what I can plant right now in my zone comes up really fast. We planted radishes, lettuce, beets, and spinach and will do more of each of these in a week or ten days or do. The rest of my garden plans are complete - tomatoes, squash, green beans, scarlet runners, peppers, strawberries, some new blueberries - and are nothing glamorous, but still enormously satisfying.

It occured to me some weeks ago that my expectations for exciting activities in March were fairly high. I simply had nothing interesting to write about and I puzzled over this until I realized that March '06 had us settling into a new house and March '05 saw us preparing to put our former house on the market. In March '04 I had a new baby and in March '03 we had just moved into the house we sold in '06. So you can see where a normal March with no new infants and no real estate news may seem a bit blah. So if I'm not post-partum and we're not fixing to move (or recover from moving), you might wonder what I've been up to.

In no particular order, I have been:

1) Falling for Google's April Fool's joke.

2) Sending psychic apologies to Daniel Craig. I have finally seen Casino Royale and I am deeply shamed over my initial, uh, disinclination toward him as Bond. I have been open here about my enthusiasm for the Bond Emeritus but, wow, beach scene, anyone?

3) Sorting out my professional life, with no appreciable result.

4) Bemoaning man's (woman's) inhumanity to man (woman). (Aside: I had no idea that expression is a Robert Burns thing. And they say that blogging isn't educational! O.K. I don't know if anyone actually says that, but you know they think it.)

5) Failing at the execution of a cute Easter project.

6) Waiting for my butter to soften so I can make the Cheddar Olives for tomorrow's egg hunt. Also on the menu: a very traditional spice cake with cream cheese frosting, deviled eggs my way, sundried tomato and garlic mini-tarts, Fromage Fort and some chocolate oaty cookie things I learned from Susie J's indespensible site of baking fabulousness. All of this is great, of course, but seriously, those olives? Try them.

Oh, and I've also watch my son ride his bike without training wheels and swim without some kind of floaty thing or belt and looked on as my daughter wrote her name all by herself for the first time.

I guess it's been a big month after all.