Painting a Room. Part Two: Undercoat

The next in a long line of ways to avoid doing assessments or whatever other important-but-painful thing you have to do is to paint an undercoat!

Procrasti Nation Score
Time Occupied... high (4 hours total)
Difficulty... moderate
Getawaywithitability... high

My parents have recently moved back into the house that they lived in when they were first married. It was designed and built by my dad - a teacher. For the last eon the house was occupied by a large and messy family who decided that they were well within their rights to paint our house... my room is bright pink. They also pinned thumbtacks right into the walls and drew in permanent marker on the powerpoints. I had a lot to do, and a lot to get cranky about. So after we sanded and filled the pin-holes, we set about getting rid of the pink. The cool thing about painting is that you often have to do multiple coats, so you can paint to procrastinate and then procrastinate from painting while it dries. Double-whammy!
A sure-fire way of knowing if you will get away with Procrasti Native acts of patriotism is if you come away dirty from it. You can't get much better than paint smears.

Painting a Room. Part One: Sanding...

I have discovered that painting a room is an awesome way to procrastinate, because there are all sorts of things to do. Many of these things are multi-step sagas in themselves - winner.

Procrasti Nation Score: Sanding.

Time... moderate (1 hr)

Difficulty... low

Getawaywithitability... eternal

There is something about manual labour that makes you feel just so darn useful. And who is going to tell you to get on with your work when you are saving them time? My dad went to the beach while my brother and I got down to avoiding business...

Shortbread Button Biscuits...

Procrasti Nation Score:

Time Occupied... high (3 hrs)
Difficulty... moderate
Getawaywithitability... high

This recipe is wonderful for procrastination because it is a super simple recipe, but has the most labour intensive decoration process - but still looks like you whipped them up out of nowhere. And you always get away with it when you make tasty treats for other people. After all, they're study aides...right?

You need:

250g softened butter
one third cup of caster sugar
two and a quarter cups of plain flour
one quarter cup of rice flour
one tablespoon of extra caster sugar

5cm round cookie cutter
the lid off of a water bottle
a skewer

You do:

Before you get started, preheat your oven to 17odegrees or 150 degrees for a fan-forced. Lightly grease two baking trays, and line with baking paper.

1. Cream the butter and sugar together until its nice and smooth. I had to do mine by hand (the joys of moving house). If you don't have an electric mixer, you can make the butter extra soft (but not melted) and then rub it into the sugar with you bare hands. Then use a whisk to beat them together. Perfect for Procrastinatives because it adds a whole step of washing butter off of your hands - and no one can say that you're not doing anything because hey! You're covered in activity!
   
2. Sift in the rice flour and plain flour, and then mix together with a wooden spoon. When it gets all crumbly, get your hands in there to bring it all together.
   
   
3. Turn the dough out onto a wooden chopping board that has been dusted with some flour - then knead the dough until it's nice and smooth. Now here comes the time-consuming part!
   
   
4. Place the lightly floured cookie cutter on the baking tray where you would like your biscuit to sit. Place one level tablespoon of the dough and put it inside the cutter. Press it gently down with your thumb until it is even, gently remove the cutter.
   
   
   
5. Roll the bottle lid in flour and press it upside-down into the dough to make a deep indentation in the centre of the biscuit. Then use the skewer to mark out the holes, and the fork to make out a pattern around the outside. I left half of mine just nicely rounded, but my brother thought the pattern made it more button-esque. I promise that this will take a lot of time and make you look very, very busy.
6. Sprinkle the biscuits with the extra caster sugar, and put them in the oven for around 30 minutes. Let them cool on the tray (of course they do taste magnificent hot from the oven).

This certainly kept me occupied when I should have been researching and writing... but I have tasty biscuits now. So who won? That's right.