The one in which I attempt to be one of those lifestyle bloggers.

So you know the beautiful blogs? With all the pictures that make you salivate and wonder how other people's lives can be so lovely and perfect all the time?

I was thinking: I can totally do that. Is cinchy.

So here goes.

Yesterday I awoke early, and after my morning 5k (down from 10k, since I'm 8 months along. Being pregnant is so easy and fun) and bowl of muesli that I made at home with high protein Turkish oats, I looked around my spotless house, glanced in the mirror at my unreasonably perfect hair and thought, hey, I have some time to whip up a batch of tangelo marmalade. Marmalade is SOOO simple and easy to make, especially since I happen to have a bumper crop of fruit growing in my own personal citrus orchard on the side of my house.

(It is essential for every woman to grow all of her own food. If she doesn't, it is pretty much the same as purposely poisoning her children with pesticides, probably damaging her daughters' eggs whilst they are still in her tiny ovaries, and thus making her grandchildren dumber than they really need to be. (I am not trying to make you feel bad. I'm just saying that everything in the grocery store might kill you. And you should go to jail if you feed it to your family.)

So I plucked the dewy, ripe fruit from the tree, feeling not unlike Eve in the garden,except you know, for no guilt, and the robe instead of the nudie, then flew inside my (super clean, you'll remember) kitchen, donned that apron that I whipped up on Tuesday (I'll post the how-to here later, but it is very difficult, you won't be able to do it, it will only make you feel bad and inferior, so there is really no hurry, right-o?), and cranked out a batch of marmalade before Tom even noticed. Then I read him stories for approximately 2.4 hours, put him down for a nap and re-read the Pulitzer-prize-winning social history I chose for book club this month: A Midwife's Tale.

Just as I was finishing up page 400, the kids tiptoed into the house waving their straight-A report cards, and were quiet as mice while working on their Valentines (I had arranged all the craft supplies on the kitchen table before they arrived. Then they whispered to each other for like an hour: I love YOU, Jane. No, I love YOU, Sam!), while I took a well-deserved nap before a grueling night of spinach dip and gossip, and high-brow intellectual discussion, with my book club girls.

The end.

How did I do?

Cause I had to go outside in my robe and climb the swing set (that will teach those golfers to hit over near the canal, they probly wanna poke their eyes out) to take that picture of my tangelo tree. And it was hard to move all the crud around in the kitchen to get that picture of the marmalade/book. See what happened when I zoomed out?

And you can't even see the mess on the kitchen table left from the Valentine-making. I'm not that good a photographer. Yet.

And who knows why I decided marmalade would be a good project for the morning? Cause I didn't finish re-reading the book club book. But it was okay, cause nobody else read it all the way through (although Melanie gets a gold star for pushing through the first chapter on medicinal herbs used in post-revolutionary Maine, to get to the juicy stuff like rape, murder-suicide, and bastardy), so I still seemed like I knew what I was talking about. Which is the most important part. Anyone actually enjoying the book is a tertiary consideration.

I guess I could blame the marmalading on nesting, but you've seen the kitchen. It doesn't look very nesty. Just nasty. Really, what happened is my neighbor asked me if I'd ever tried making marmalade, cause she has a couple trees as well, (I have a tangelo and a navel) and I started get post-traumatic-stress flashbacks from that time when the sugar shot out of the pot like bullets and I burned the whole mess black. You can read about it here. I have no kitchen secrets.

So anyhow, I took her question as a challenge. Was I going to let the fruit win? Or was I going to dominate it, as is my right as the used-to-be-medium-foxy (and perhaps will be again in like 1.5 years) steward of the earth that I am?

Well, you saw the photos. The marmalade is not black. I spread those tangelos on my toast so fast, they didn't know what digested them.

And the victory was sweet. (But also a little bitter, cause of the rind. Which is how it is supposed to taste.)

Now I am going to get dressed, clean my kitchen, make pies for Church Valentine's dance party tonight, and probly leave the mess to clean up for tomorrow. I'm not sure I'll be dancing, unless I wear my support hose. Is very sexy and romantic, like the card I got Jake. (Don't worry, he won't see it before Sunday. He doesn't read my blog unless I tell him I've written inappropriate/potentially embarrassing things about him):

P.S.

The nap was fictitious. And since I got home a la one a.m., I am pretty groggy.

And if you know me at all, you know there was no running.

And I don't know if they grow oats in Turkey.

And Jane and Sam loathe each other. Jane kicked out one of Sam's teeth last month. Luckily, it was already loose.

Oh, and Ross really did bring home a straight-A report card. He finally ran out of novels to read in class.

P.S. again. I hope nobody is offended. I LIKE food blogs, and looking at crafty things that you can make and I can't keeps me humble. Thanks for that.