**original update from July 11, 2011.
The weekend started off so well: coffee at an independent shop; finding underwear that fit and that was on sale. Wow.
Yvonne decided to push her luck and attempt to continue an edit of her first manuscript. She dusted off her PC and found herself suddenly into the flow of writing. Amazing!
Then her PC decided to hibernate. It wouldn’t start back up.
After a moment’s panic, (read: “Oh shit….oh my fucking god…!” and a series of heart palpitations) Yvonne found that her innate anal tendencies had already won the battle — she’d backed up her PC recently onto her Mac. Hallelujah! Yvonne then spent the rest of the day writing on her Mac. Fabulous!
Aside from that one little glitch and the resulting reduction of her life span by 5 years, Saturday couldn’t have been better.
Sunday started off well too. Yvonne plugged into Dave Matthews and, coffee in hand, proceeded to take up where she left off on her manuscript.
At some point, the coffee cup was drained and she got up to make some tea. At some later point, she remembered that she was making tea. By that point, the kettle had fused with the stove element, the water having long since evaporated.
Yvonne should have taken the hint, quit, and retreated to the sofa with a book, or even a movie. But, no. Instead, she rode the high of writing and continued on through to cheese-making. Because, you see, a writing-high is like a running-high; once you’re there, you feel that you can keep going for miles, despite the hints you may get from your body. And after two days of writing, Yvonne was definitely THERE.
The recipe and ingredients (citric acid, rennet, and cheese salt) for “30-minute mozzerella” had been sitting in Yvonne’s cupboard since last October. Now was the time.
Armed with 2L of organic milk, a new thermometre, and armloads of confidence, Yvonne began to make cheese.
Four litres of milk and almost four hours later, Yvonne had two-fist sized balls of cheese, really sore hands, and a new appreciation for her own level of patience. Whether or not the cheese was really mozzerella may have been a matter of contention. However, it was edible.
Yvonne decided to tack all this up as experience: she’s now armed with the knowledge of how labour-intensive cheese-making is, and has absolutely no qualms about paying the exorbitant price for any cheese; the recipe for “30-minute mozzerella” went in the recycling bin; she also went straight to Staples to buy a new flash drive with which to back up her Mac. She was also convinced that only archaeologists or likewise anally-tended, physically-capable people are fit for making cheese.
Will Yvonne ever try cheese-making again? Will Yvonne’s PC wake up from its self-induced hibernation? Will Yvonne ever walk away from the manuscript of her first book and leave it alone, for good?
Stay tuned!
The Reluctant Archaeologist 
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