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Writing and not writing and a vegetarian lunch menu at the bottom

I have not written very much this summer.
I had wanted to make excuses; I am now working two jobs; our youngest has turned into a very strong-willed little person and is making family life both rich and complicated; the beach was so very much more compelling than this laptop; I have been ill and it's not likely to improve; we demolished one very mouldy bathroom and we are not really agreeing on the replacement design and I would rather spend my evenings painting watercolors of tile layouts involving giant squid and Fibonacci sequences than writing a blog....
... but each of these, all of these would be surmountable if I got my hiking boots on and started climbing (where 'climbing' happens wrapped in a blanket on a couch, between 10PM and 1AM, and sometimes just after dawn)
Why am I not climbing?

It kindof goes like this.

I am always having ideas, globular amorphous things that drift out of some deep thought process, float up past my awareness, and I go "Hey that's cool? and sometimes note them down. My current list has no particular order:

• Specific Gnostic texts firing up my feminist indignation with Christianity (I knew I shouldn't have hit the theology)
• Bees and food security vs. suburban anxiety about insects
• 21st century slavery and the new Triangular Trade
• Super tasty vegetarian lunch
• Social virtue is now measured in learning and eating habits rather than good manners and religion
• 5 steps for how a husband can stop a fight quickly without losing
• The slogan of an empire probably encapsulates the seed of its destruction
• The appropriate demographics to be In Charge of Stuff (not necessarily 50YO Caucasian men)
• Peoples' minds are much more diverse than our similar bodies might encourage us to assume
• Developing a too-late crush on Christopher Hitchens and George Eliot
• That shark cull in WA

See? Ideas. All over the shop. In Terry Pratchett's Discworld, I might have been caught in a meteor-like shower of incident beams of inspiration. In Elizabeth Gilbert's genius paradigm, I might be compelled by a possessing force or chasing an external genius (genie) to identify and chip out these ideas. But you can see that they are still stuck in rock (or maybe spongecake - I am possibly more like Martha Stewart than Michelangelo), and I have only traced the outline on the surface and am not digging in.
I am not digging in.
I am not brave enough - which is strange because I am not normally one who suffers from fear.

1. Writing has an effect on me and my family. Carving out the texture of an idea, the fine grained detail, cross-referencing and finding credible sources to back it up with some evidence is both time-consuming and absorbing. I get small strange obsessions, like the life cycle of an octopus and the CO2 sequestration potential of different eucalypt species. My colleagues have started to ask me how to fix a toilet, what's the deal with the Ukraine, and what to plant which will trail nicely and cool their verandah - and I mostly have answers. Ideas lead to more ideas, I stay up later, I write a bit of blog, a bit for a magazine, and then go read up about plankton identification. I freak out about fisheries management, talk to my family and before I know it my 7YO tells me that he wants to crew on the Steve Irwin to stop the shark cull in Western Australia, and my 4YO is explaining the Fukushima nuclear disaster to his kinder group. With everything else in our busy life, I don't need to be chasing these trails. I figured it might be easier for us all to be happily ill-informed and quiet, and leave those ideas in the rock/spongecake.
2. I risk my idea being wrong in the first place. I'm getting a reputation for being right (within the broad definition of right = not wrong). What if I'm wrong?
3. Worse, I risk discovering that it is actually a really good idea and someone else wrote about it before I got there. (Recently; Niesche, Battlestar Galactica scriptwriters, and some bird contributing to Melbourne's Child magazine have all got there before me)
4. Worse still, I risk not being good enough to write about a good idea. I am worried that I am a bit like a duck who got struck by the wrong incident idea, and is struggling to communicate the solution to the world's energy crisis by ruffling her feathers and going quack.
5. Worst of all, I risk pointlessness. Even if it's good, what if it's a waste? I risk being the person who patents a superior typewriter during the rise of IBM. I wonder about Isaac Newton spending his best thinking years trying to find numerical patterns in the Bible.  
6. And I have recently been really enjoying knitting. I can't knit and write at the same time.

 OK I'm done, and shall get on with writing.

Super tasty vegetarian lunch menu, for my best friend from school and her Danish Sikh husband when they come to visit next month.
Flat mushrooms sprinkled with olive oil, oregano and breadcrumbs, grilled for 10mins
Home-grown potato gratin; slice and pre-microwave the potatoes, make a dairy free Bechamel sauce substituting soy for milk and olive oil for butter, bake for 20mins
Corn, bean and chick pea fritters, bound with egg and flour, flavoured with fresh coriander and probably a dash of worcestershire sauce, served with habanero chilli sauce for the grownups and sour cream for the kids
A basic green salad with added mango and mint for variety
Honey-baked quince for dessert

Now the list of ideas is one shorter.  I am off to sleep.