The evenings are packed
Second Career offers funding for unemployed people returning to school to retrain for work that's in demand. This might prove valuable in a few months.
I've also been looking into websites that hire freelance writers of web content. In fact I've applied to one. The pay starts out low, $.007 per word, but reviews state there is lots of work and opportunity to progress up to $.03 per word. I could work during free time for now. It would be good experience to write to requirements and deadlines again.
I've also continued the self-directed nature writing course. I need to tackle reading some of the classics. Where to start? It's an overwhelming question and my time is limited. Thoreau's essay, Walking, and many works can be found online.
What we consider the nature writing genre is unfortunately rooted in Western thought and experience from the past two centuries. A few years ago I acquired Encompassing Nature: Nature and Culture from Ancient Times to the Modern World. It's a 1,224-page anthology containing many hundreds of selections from poetry, myth, fiction, essays, et cetera, but pointedly excluding the classics (no Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau or Rachel Carson) in favour of cross-culturalism.
Remember the apartment flood on January 31, 2008 that destroyed (among other things) a lot of my books? Less than a week earlier I had reorganized my library, moving many of my favourites from the doomed living room shelves to a new shelf in my bedroom, where they were spared. This tome was one of them. I'm finally getting around to reading it again, dabbling because it's too big to tackle.
Evenings I've been inspired to concentrate on these career threads, and frankly this is far more important, so I haven't made any progress on the cookbook idea yet.