Roll Heaven

1. Does anyone else get stressed out by baking bread? Cooking is easy enough because you can taste as you go but with baking you have to hope that you got all the measurements right and you kneaded the dough enough times and the temperature was perfect for the yeast to work its magic and you sacrificed the goat properly in the light of a full moon. Then you pop it in the oven with a prayer in your heart. Well, on  Easter I was in charge of the rolls and if there is one thing I really care about at holiday meals, it is the rolls. And if there is one thing that has ruined many perfectly lovely holiday meals is me making sub-par rolls. I feel like Ruby from the Great British Baking show every time I have to make them.

Get a grip, Ruby!

All my life I've been trying to find the perfect roll recipe. I like rolls to be enormous and fluffy and have those layers that kind of peel away. You know what I'm talking about. And you guys, I did it. I made those rolls - and I did it entirely by accident! I totally botched three steps on the recipe and yet they still turned out like roll heaven. So now the question stands: do I follow the recipe exactly the next time or do I make the same mistakes? It was America's Test Kitchen Fluffy Dinner Rolls from their baking cookbook, which you should own. Amen.

2. In other success news, I changed my first sprinkler today. This morning at 5:30 I woke up to a gusher outside my window. I think the guys who mow our lawns must have run over it. So I got Dad on the phone and had him talk me through it. Here's how you do it: 1. unscrew broken one, 2. take it to Home Depot and find a similar one, 3. screw in new one, 4. test it, 5. do a victory dance when it works, 6. consider getting a job at Home Depot since you're there all the time now. The hardest part was digging the old one out enough to unscrew. I was covered in mud and felt like a real champion. Now, if I could just be more successful at growing stuff my Yard Master status would be secure.

3. Maybe you're really missing Commander Kelly's Instagram feed from space now that he's home. Well, never fear, fellow space nerds! There are always astronauts in the ISS and most of them are on Instagram. All three of the non-Russians have accounts. There's Tim Peake (astro_timpeake), Tim Kopra (astro_tim) and Jeff Williams (astro_jeffw). Have a look.