Hello, my name is Laura, and I am a perfectionist. I bet that comes as a surprise to, um, let me count them…no one! I’d say that in many senses being a perfectionist isn’t a bad thing, as long as you’re able you’re able to keep reigns on the extent to which it controls your life. But I’m realizing lately that my perfectionist manifests itself in 3 counterintuitive, flawed ways.

For one thing, part of my perfectionism includes wanting to get everything done, SO I sometimes will choose crossing things off “the list” over being meticulous and precise. This is the one that I thought seemed counterintuitive: one would think the perfectionist would want everything, well, perfect! But I take such pleasure in seeing a completed list that sometimes I don’t pay attention to all the little details along the way. Unfortunately I started noticing this one at work. I need to find a balance between the two, wherein I don’t get hung up on an individual tree in the forest and not get anything done but wherein I also look at each tree as I pass it by.

A second unhealthy outcome of my perfectionism is a tendency to not give activities their due when I feel I am not good at them. A. has noticed this one a lot when we’re playing games together. It tends to start with my getting frustrated and not having a good time and sometimes ends with me dropping it all together (though in games that tide shifts enough that I’m usually able to persevere!). Learning to play guitar is a good example of this. In high school, I really wanted to be able to play the guitar…but since I already knew how to play the piano and was reasonably proficient at it, I absolutely dreaded the time during which I would be bad at playing the guitar. So, I learned about three chords and then never picked it up again.

Which is directly related to my third issue: being so afraid of making mistakes or so overwhelmed by the scope of something that I am paralyzed and can’t figure out how to start. This panicky feeling comes upon me when I’m faced with a new task or skill. I am likely quite capable of figuring it out, but I would so much rather have someone explain it to me and tell me the steps so that I can just immediately be good at it (and get it done). I’ve always been great at tests on which I needed to regurgitate my notes…and not so great at solving problems that require me to come up with steps leading to a solution. The minute I start to see something going awry or feel like I don’t know the next step, I burst; my college chemistry lab partner/meticulous roommate can directly attest to this point. :-)

I’m not sure what this all means, but I am realizing that these three responses to perfectionism color a lot of what I do. I don’t think I’m a bad person because of them, nor do I think I need to make a 180 degree life change. But I think identifying things about yourself is the first step to growing and maturing. So we will see where all of this leads…

Do you have any pet personality quirks? How have elements of your personality evolved as you’ve gotten to know yourself better?

One of my birthday resolutions last year (last year! that sounds crazy!) was to try my hand at baking bread. For A.’s birthday, I attempted some sourdough that came out okay. Well, for Christmas I got a beautiful enameled cast-iron Dutch oven, so my parents passed on to me a recipe for no-knead bread that requires baking in a pre-heated Dutch oven.

The recipe is simple:

• 3 cups bread flour
• 1 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/4 yeast
• 1 1/3 cups cool water
• additional flour for dusting

The recipe comes from Jim Lahey’s book My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method. Since my kitchen has limited counter space, anything that requires less of it is an improvement! Plus, there’s such an art to kneading dough: too much, and it becomes tough, but too little and the gluten doesn’t develop enough. I was just as glad to take that element out of the equation (well, not to mention the whole complexity of having a starter, which I needed for the sourdough).

I mixed the ingredients up on Sunday night, since the book recommends a 12-18 hour first rise. I brought the bowl into our bedroom overnight covered with a cloth. Yes, you read that right. The dough needed to be at “room temperature” in order to rise, and the bedroom is the only room we heat at night, so I knew the rest of the apartment would be too cold! The dough wasn’t sticky like the recipe said it would be, so I was a little apprehensive. But sure enough, when I woke up Monday morning the lump had grown a little bit. I left it on top of the refrigerator (hopefully also warm?) to continue rising while I went to work. It had developed a couple of dry, kind of scaly spots on the top, so I think it was simply too dry (which is also probably why it wasn’t sticky).

That evening before dinner I dumped the dough out and formed it into a rough ball on top of a dusted tea towel. I folded that around it and left it to rise again for another few hours. Part of the trick to baking this bread is putting it into an already hot dutch oven. Well, I discovered in the instructions for mine that you are NOT supposed to heat an empty pan, because it could damage the enamel. Hmm. After some brainstorming on the phone with my mom, we came up with the idea to put a little bit of water in the bottom while letting it heat with the oven and then pouring it out before adding the bread. It worked! The water was SUPER hot, of course, as the oven needed to be at 475 for this recipe, but I got it poured down the sink sans burns.

The potentially tricky part of this recipe is transferring the supposedly sticky dough from its home on the tea towel into the HOT pot. As I mentioned, my dough wasn’t particularly sticky, so I had no trouble on this step. It baked with the lid on for 30 minutes, and then for another 15 without the lid to allow for browning.

It came out pretty beautiful!

I will warn you, this is a very crusty bread. I think that’s the point of using such a hot pot to bake it: the outside gets sort of shocked and so becomes really crusty. Despite all my efforts at providing it warmth, my bread was a little dense, so I think it didn’t quite rise enough. But you live and learn. Lahey’s book has tons of variations on this simple recipe, and you could probably also come up with your own. The hardest part of making this bread is making sure you start it early enough to have plenty of time to rise. Otherwise, this yields fancy-seeming homemade bread with pretty minimal effort! I’d recommend it if you’re interested in baking some bread but aren’t sure about the entire process. Bon appetit!

When you clip coupons in hopes of matching them up to a sale, you’ll inevitably end up with some coupons that expire without you using them. I try to go through my coupon organizer once a week, culling expired coupons and adding new ones to my inventory. I usually just recycle the expired ones, but I recently found out about a way to give them new life!

Apparently on military bases, coupons can be used up to 6 months past their expiration date. There’s an organization called the Overseas Coupon Program that gathers coupons from people like me and distributes them to families on base. I’ll warn you, their website is pretty ungainly, but it seems like a worthy enough cause that I persevered.

To begin the process, you choose an available base to “adopt.” It seems like you can send coupons without having done this, but they’d prefer to know where people are committed so that they can “close” certain bases if enough people have selected it. I chose a U. S. Marine Corps base in Japan, for the somewhat arbitrary reason that A.’s dad was in the Marines and they lived over there for a few years of his childhood. Once you fill out a short form to adopt the base, they ask that you report your totals, divided into food and non-food, so they can know what to expect. I ended up having around $34 worth of coupons to send! (My number of expired coupons was particularly high this time because many expired at the end of the year.)

You’re then supposed to bundle them up and take them to the post office to mail. The address where I was sending them is an FPO box, so it actually only requires domestic postage. The mailing instructions on the website made it sound like it might be pretty tedious getting the envelope out; they discuss at length what method is best to use and how to fill out the customs form. I decided not to mess with priority mail or anything and just used a regular envelope. Also, when I got to the post office to ask for help with customs, the clerk told me it was considered a letter and thus didn’t need a customs form! I’m not sure whether he led me astray or if the information on the website is outdated or overly cautious. Either way, my envelope cost $0.64 (because of its weight, not the international factor), and I just stuck 2 forever stamps on it and tossed it in the outgoing mail. That’s probably how I’ll do it next time, too, so I sure hope it gets there! You can request a confirmation email from the OCP, but otherwise I don’t think you have any way of tracking or following up on your coupons. They liken it to giving blood, where you won’t hear from the recipient of your donation and just have to trust in the system that it did its good work. I’m okay with that–for $0.64 and not too much skin off my back, if my expired coupons have even a chance at a second life it’s worth it.

I felt a little funny about doing this at first, because I’m not 100% sure how I feel about war, etc. But ultimately that’s not what this is about. It’s about families (who likely aren’t actively fighting) who are in a tough position away from family and friends. I’m picturing a young mother who probably doesn’t WANT to be in Japan and is struggling to make ends meet walking into the PX and seeing a stack of coupons and being able to breathe a sigh of relief that she can pay for her groceries. That’s why I’m giving this a shot. I won’t mail coupons every week–I’ll let them build up until I have a decent sized packet again, since the OCP only asks that you send them within 2 months of their expiration. I might also start clipping coupons for baby care items, since I would not be using those right now and I can imagine that’s an area that gets really expensive. My only fear is that for some reason my coupons won’t reach their destination, but I guess that’s a risk you take when mailing anything. All in all, I think this is a cool program that I’m glad to contribute to!

I don’t know that I’ve ever really made New Year’s Resolutions, per se, but I have a few things I’m setting as goals for myself this year. One is to do the Couch 2 5K training program and find a 5K to run at the end of it that supports a cause I care about. I’ve run a 5K before, but running and I have an interesting relationship. I swam for many, many years, and occasionally my coaches would decided to add running to our training regimen. I always hated it! My body just doesn’t seem to like the motion, and I get short of breath much sooner than I feel like my overall fitness level should indicate.

As a pride thing, though, I’ve always wished I were a runner. It seems like EVERYONE runs, and saying you’re a walker just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. So I’ve had bursts where I’ve decided I was going to force myself to become a runner, one of which culminated in my 5K. Since my only impetus for wanting to run was pride, though, I’ve lately decided not to push it. I enjoy other kinds of exercise, and I’ve just been doing those. There’s no reason I need to be able to say I’m a runner. HOWEVER, I somehow decided I wanted to do this Couch 2 5K thing. I have a feeling I’ll make it through just fine and then stop running again. I don’t envision myself wanting to work up to a 10K or anything longer, but I guess you never know. I found a podcast of indie Christian music that combines audio cues with up-tempo music to guide your workout, so I’m at least looking forward to checking that out on the first day! The plan calls for 3 workouts a week, but if I miss my elliptical too much I might do 2 running and one elliptical, stretching the plan beyond its allotted 9 weeks (with some pilates and Wii Zumba thrown in on alternate days, too!). I’m using the treadmill version found here, if you’d like to join me!

Another goal I have, which was also part of my Birthday Resolutions, is to finally stick with a Bible reading plan. I’m going to use a year-long, whole Bible plan on YouVersion, an app I have on my phone. I may or may not actually read it on my phone, but it at least will give me a checklist, of sorts. I know I shouldn’t think of reading the Bible as just another to-do, but at least at first I think I need to in order to make it a daily habit and a part of my day that I look forward to.

A related goal I have is to participate in Beth Moore’s Siesta Scripture Memory Challenge when she starts it up for 2012. I’ve glanced at it on her blog for the past year but am actually going to follow along this year. I’m looking forward to buying a cute little index card flip book to write them on. :-)

I found a printable daily planner from Ann Voskamp that I’m going to try out for awhile. I think it will give me a good place for the to-do lists I always write while also giving me a place to record my Bible reading, my Scripture memory verse, my exercise plan, and some bigger picture things. I’m not sure if the page will serve my needs in the long run (the sections seemed a bit redundant as I filled out the first one), but I think it’ll be fun to give it a shot!

Have you made any resolutions or goals for this year? How do you organize things you’d like to get done?

We couldn’t send Christmas cards to everyone, but here’s a digital greeting from Andy and me! Hope you have a peaceful, relaxing, and joyous holiday weekend.