How I make my own life more difficult

I have plans.  Lots of plans.  They always seem small, like, I'm going to sew this, or I'm going to cook that.  Sometimes they take a bit more time and energy than I had anticipated.  But that is not the problem. 

The problem is my inability to quit when things get too difficult.  Case in point: I found a recipe for butternut squash gnocchi.  I'd never made gnocchi before, but I recently discovered butternut squash (I think maybe my dad hates it; that tends to explain the omission of a few foods from my childhood diet), and man, is that stuff tasty!  I decided to make it for Natasha's birthday dinner today.  But as the recipe is a bit involved, I had to start yesterday morning.  First you have to roast the squash, then squeeze out the juice, then make the dough.  Then you have to chill the dough.  Then you roll it out into long ropes, cut it, and put the classic gnocchi grooves into it.  Last night around 9:30, as I was rolling out the stupid dough and thinking about everything else I needed to get done before Natasha's birthday, would have been a good time to quit.

But the dough was already made!  All I had to do was roll it out, cut it, and painstakingly press every.single.little.piece into the tines of a fork.  Never mind that I had never had any kind of gnocchi, much less this recipe.  Never mind that I had no idea whether anyone in my family would even like it.  Nor that I still had to finish sewing Natasha's present (more on that below), wrap the presents family had sent and making frosting and frost the cupcakes.  No.  I had started the blasted gnocchi, and I needed to finish them.  It took me an hour and a half.

Well, here they are, uncooked and looking rough since it's not dinnertime yet.  Fingers crossed that my kids and husband like them.

Which brings me to Natasha's gift.  I got it in my head a few months ago that I was going to make her some felt food for her birthday.  And, since I like to complicate everything, I decided this food needed to be made out of wool felt, not the acrylic stuff that you can buy at the craft store.  Wool felt is crazy expensive.  It does feel a bit nicer than acrylic, plus it's not made of recycled Mountain Dew bottles.  I know, good for the environment, but maybe not so much for my kids' health.  Before you jump down my throat - I concede they're probably fine.  I'm just weird like that. 

Anyway.  The combination of wool felt being expensive, my being too cheap to buy felt food patterns (ironic, no?), and my limited artistic abilities, made me terrified to cut into the felt for fear of messing up.  And that meant that I was way behind where I ought to have been, volume-wise, and is the reason I decided I had to make a box for the felt ravioli at 10 p.m. yesterday.  Here's the finished cache.  Minus the pear, apple, pumpkin, cabbage, etc., etc., that I didn't get around to.  Christmas is coming, right?

Of course, N picked up the felt watermelon, tasted it, proclaimed it "kaka" and put it back.  Oh well.  She'll appreciate it later, right?