Sometimes the right way is the wrong way.

Yup, that's a half-eaten sandwich. Peanut butter and jelly, to be precise. I eat peanut butter and jelly for lunch frequently. I get bulk deliveries of peanut butter and jelly every few months, courtesy of my landlady. Normally I bake all my own bread.

You might be wondering why I'm sharing pictures of my lunch with you. Well, this is a very unusual sandwich. See, things have been a little crazy around here lately. We had the Great (Continuing) Propane Guy Disaster of Wednesday, which made a lot of additional work. In the middle of filling the Perpetual Trench Next To The Barn, the first of J&H's pregnant goats decided to have twins while only J was home, causing J to - well, I don't think "freak out" is too strong. This had a dramatic effect on the way Thursday went, as compared to the way it was scheduled to go. Then yesterday the time came for one of the property stakeholders to arrive; he's moving in permanently but stayed only overnight because he really only came to pick up the Jeep so he could go get another stakeholder who's moving in permanently. The weather has been really cloudy and rainy for weeks, causing a chronic shortage of available electrical power from the solar system.

What, you ask in increasingly annoyed perplexity, does any of this have to do with my fricking sandwich? It all has to do with it. Basically, the last half of the week got so nuts I didn't take time to make bread, but I needed some on hand because I was having a visitor. So Thursday afternoon at the conclusion of the Goat Crisis, during my monthly-or-so trip to town, I did something I never, ever do: I bought a loaf of bread.

Didn't think anything of it at the time - need bread, buy bread. Right? That's the way most people do it; it's arguably the right way to do it. Turns out I didn't use any of it during the stakeholder's stay, but I opened the package a while ago to make a sandwich for lunch. I then:

Made the sandwich.

Bit into the sandwich.

Damned near spat my mouthful of the sandwich into the sink.

The peanut butter tasted like peanut butter. The jelly tasted like jelly. The bread tasted like cardboard. Unusually unpalatable cardboard. It's not Wonder Bread, or the crappy store-brand stuff; I wouldn't feed that to a guest. It's a perfectly good loaf of perfectly good middle-class-consumer-grade sandwich bread. And it tasted terrible to me. I may not finish the loaf.

See, I often get to patting myself on the back for the low-tech, no-frills back-to-nature lifestyle I've been adopting out here in the boonies. And I also often bitch about some of the inconveniences and discomforts of said lifestyle. It's actually pretty easy to forget that there are some downright luxurious advantages as well. Like fresh-baked wheat bread with rosemary fresh from the garden, hot out of the oven, dripping with real butter. Yeah, baby.

It's been well over a year since I bit down on a piece of grocery-store bread, and I don't suppose there's really anything wrong with it. It's just that in that time I'd actually forgotten how much better mine is.