Whether you are Christian or not, Easter is this weekend and it's a good excuse to wear pastels and eat candy! 

Because I wasn't really a big fan of packaged sweets even before I went Paleo, I made these homemade candy bars.

Yes, these are lovely, aren't they? But don't get me wrong--I'm not trying to take credit for some ingenious recipe over here. Basically, these things have the same ingredients as this chocolate bark, only presented in a different way. But like I said, Easter is coming up and I was trying to be festive. And since I can feel content simply eating melted chocolate and nuts right out of a bowl with a spoon, I thought it would be very fancy of me to make some bars while I was at it.

Ingredients:

11.5 oz bag of dark chocolate chips

2 squares of Baker's Chocolate

1 tablespoon coconut oil

Several handfuls of hazelnuts, chopped

Several handfuls of unsweetened, shredded coconut

1. Melt the chocolate in a double boiler, stir in the coconut oil (it makes it rich and shiny like ganache).

2. Throw in the chopped hazelnuts and shredded coconut. (How much of these ingredients you use depends upon how much you like nuts/coconut in your candy. I like it a lot, so I load it up).

3. Pour your chocolate/hazelnut/coconut mixture onto a parchment paper-lined baking sheet. 

Now comes a little trick!

I fold the parchment paper up like a little present so that the chocolate will end up thicker.

4. Freeze until solid. Unwrap from parchment paper, cut into bars and top with extra nuts and coconut. 

5. Enjoy! Have them with tea, or have them on their own. Refrigerate any extra. There probably won't be many left over.

Who needs Peeps when you've got these? 

I have found myself feeling unsettled this week.

April came, and with it came the realization that the first draft of my thesis needs to be done and submitted by June first. That's two months. I have never had so much time to write a paper before, and so I have never before worked so slowly. I think I managed to forget what it's like to get my stuff together and just write, finishing something in a week at the most. So I feel overwhelmed--overwhelmed with ideas, overwhelmed with pages that still need to be written, overwhelmed with the idea of finally being done with school for the first time in my life. I'm so ready for that, and yet, I'm just not.

Also, our apartment is a mess. How does this happen? I think what happens is that I have a job, and Rob is in class all day, and then I'm supposed to come home and work on my paper, which I just told you I'm not really working on too much, but I'm certainly thinking about working on it, and that's exhausting! So our home never stays well-organized for long.

I want to finish my paper + Master's program. I want to clean my apartment. I want to cook dinner and be productive and go to bed feeling like I accomplished something big. Really, I do. But there's something wrong. It's like writers block, but it's happening to everything. Life block. So I sit, overwhelmed with everything I need to do but am not actually doing.

I make to-do lists in expensive notebooks with nice pens, but I write things like "paint nails" and "clean your room" in the lines between "pay rent" and "follow up on interview." Maybe this is just what life looks like as a graduate student.

It reminds me of the way I sometimes feel about this particular point in my journey. I find myself teetering unsteadily in this rather awkward and sometimes uncomfortable liminality--at once so ready for "real life," so eager to be an adult, and yet, so unprepared, and still with so much work to do.

[View of the world from my parents' deck, taken March 2012. Text quoted below.]

"I wished for things to stay the same. I wished for stillness everywhere, but I opened up the rest of the bedroom windows and let the world in" (Megan Mayhew Bergman, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, page 59).

Here's to letting the world in and then doing something with it.

On Saturday morning, I managed to remind myself of all the reasons I love to run. There is something wonderful about being a runner. It's about constantly re-discovering just how strong you are. You go out there and run a race with 40,000 other people and really feel like part of a community, but when it starts to rain and your legs get tired and it hurts, all that really matters is you and that voice within that says you can still finish the damn thing, blow your goal time away, and make yourself proud. So that's what you do. I hope I never outgrow this thing that has become such a huge part of my life.

After our post-race brunch, showers, and respective nap times at Tina's apartment, Rob and I headed to Farmville to visit some friends at Hampden-Sydney. 

I woke up on Sunday morning and got in my car to drive the six miles down Back Hampden-Sydney Road, one of my favorite little drives to do alone in the morning. I always do the same thing: I play the same old Taylor Swift album, I roll the windows down, and I allow myself to be completely overcome with memories from college, like that drive between Longwood and Hampden-Sydney that Rob and I did so often that very first spring we were together. Then I get coffee.

This time, I made a friend. This dog came running up to me out of nowhere when I pulled over to take a picture of the road.

He gave me some kisses and then ran alongside my car for a while after I told him to go home.

I went to bed so tired on Sunday night, but so thankful for the chance to remember how important a few things are to me.

Life is good in the spring, isn't it?