Progress is not linear. Alice said this once, right around when we started pulling up the unfortunate tile in the kitchen, and it has been reverberating in my head ever since. I’m not sure a sentence has ever felt more true as we ricochet back and forth between projects. Not one thing feels fully complete yet, which is a troublesome state to be in as someone who derives deep satisfaction and some semblance of peace in being able to at least check something fully off the list. And yet! Despite the list not getting shorter and possibly getting longer somehow, progress is being made!

For example, the kitchen used to look like this:

And now it looks like this! Plus cleaned and re-painted light fixtures not pictured here.

Once the kitchen was ready to house equipment again, we embarked on cleaning said equipment, much of which had years of ancient grease (greece) to reckon with. This took us a week, and still, not everything is as clean as we’d like it to be. I have been purchasing as much used equipment as possible, and while that has saved us lots of money, we’ve paid for that choice with a week of our lives spent degreasing and cleaning (if not more). Worth it though.

The biggest (and probably cleanest!) purchase I’m especially excited about is securing a stand mixer that will stand up to sticky rye dough.

So yeah, progress is not linear. It’s kind of all over the place happening on parallel lines which somehow all magically intersect at some point even though they are parallel lines. One day you have to go to Gretna for equipment, and then acquiring equipment means finding someone who can come that afternoon to get it out of the car, and then another day you thought you had ordered enough wallpaper because you used the calculator thing but lo and behold as has happened to too many unfortunate souls, it is not enough wall paper! And now the bathroom will not be finished for two more weeks! (We are really excited about the bathroom walls though and no, there will be no sneak peeks because some things must remain in suspense).

We are also finally starting to work on the dining room decor which is cute and fun and makes the elbow grease work a bit more tolerable. And then parallel to that I’m figuring out payroll and accounting systems and am starting to wrap my head around vendors, hiring, and standardizing recipes and lions and tigers and bears oh my, etc.

And then parallel to THAT, we are still making sure to ground ourselves in the joy and excitement of it all. We are taking breaks to rest our bodies and minds. We got pedicures last weekened and went bookshopping and perused the isles at Mona’s for pine nuts and turkish delights and read Russian fairy tales to each other! We went tubing on Thursday! Let us glorify rest the way we glorify hard work. Because progress is not linear and progress should include rest. I think a lot about how we love to talk about how hard we work but not always about how intentionally we should rest to make that work possible. Even in writing this I hesitated a bit in talking about the fun stuff and that is just sad. So, here is to non-linear progress and rest in between.

Until next time!

Katya