On Friday, after Thanksgiving, Stepan and I went to Mikasa to take advantage of their one-day, 25% off sale. The special pricing did include the serving pieces to my china pattern. I was very excited about getting the covered casserole dish...it's really the only piece I really needed. I was especially thrilled because not only was it on sale, but we also had a wedding gift certificate and another item to exchange so our out-of-pocket for the $120 dish was only $30. Our purchase complete, we headed back to the car (which we had parked at Gateway theater since we were going to see a movie as well). I was pleased as punch thinking about our next formal dining occassion - probably in January when we restart our gourmet club by hosting an Egyptian brunch. I was horribly proud - my china set was complete and we were smart/thrifty when completing it....maybe if I hadn't been so smug I would have noticed that my hiking boot had come untied...maybe if my head hadn't been in the clouds, I would have thought to grab on tighter to Stepan with my right hand instead of trying to catch myself the left...the one carrying the bag with my beautiful, Palatial Platinum, covered casserole dish...maybe...maybe...maybe...From incredible elation to complete despondance in space a single misstep. I was appalled...mortified...embarrassed beyond belief. I picked myself up from the parking lot and limped to the curb (my knee was scraped and I still have an impressive bruise)...I just wanted the earth to open up, swallow me whole, protect me from my own clumsiness. That didn't happen so instead I wrapped my arms around Stepan and buried my head in his chest...SNAP...my glasses broke from the force of my embrace....(heavy sigh)...I was not having a very good day.
I got home last night and my new Sony Clie was waiting for me on my doorstep. It's been fun reading up on the features it offers. I haven't done much with it yet because I need to synch it with the information from my old palm which is on my computer at work. I did get an extra hot synch cradle though so I'll have access to my information both at work and at home. It's a color PDA so I can load nice pictures of my friends and loved ones onto it. It can also function as an mp3 player and a remote control for the television. The one I got is the "sunset orange" color of the one in the link....it's very pretty.
Productive Weekend
Last night, while waiting for my Clie to charge, I wrote an additional 5 thank you notes (Stepan is WAY behind). Today, we brought our outdoor Christmas lights down from the attic and spent a good portion of the day putting them up. Stepan took care of the icicles on roof and I finally installed the luminaire sets I bought three years ago. The outside of the house looks quite festive. We'll probably put the Christmas tree up next weekend - which gives me one week to organize and clean up the living room. I'm kinda in a cleaning mood, so hopefully I can get it done.
Going along with the "productive" theme - I also did an amazing cleaning job on our kitchen. I cleared off all the non-kitchen crap that tends to collect on our counters. It actually looks like a kitchen you wouldn't mind cooking in now. I've told Stepan that mail, wallets, books, magazines, etc. no longer belong on the kitchen counter. I guess I'll also have to be a lot better about where I set my stuff down when I come in the door since I'm probably just as guilty as Step - it just seems to bother me more when it's his stuff :-)
One more production note: last night, Stepan prepared the dough for a couple of batches of gingerbread cookies. Tonight we roll the dough, cut out the Christmas shapes, and bake the cookies. Tomorrow morning we'll decorate them...hopefully the icing will be dry in time for our first Christmas party of the season at 2pm. We'll definitely be making more Christmas cookies this year, though I'm not sure how many gingerbread cookies we'll actually do. If I remember correctly, we did many, serveral dozen last year and it took FOREVER to decorate them.
Always, always, always....and it bears repeating again....always use parchment paper on your baking sheet when baking cookies. It really helps prevent burning the bottoms of the cookies and makes for a much easier clean-up. It also prevents cookies from sticking to the baking sheet. Sadly, we didn't find that out until we had two cookie sheets out of the oven. We managed to salvage three or four gingerbread cookies, but the rest were only pieces and crumbs. Still, they do taste yummy...even Homer agrees. And since we doubled the recipe we still have enough to decorate and share with our friends and family.
I've been searching and searching my house for my Hershey's Chocolate Cookbook. It has recipies for cookies that we made for Christmas last year that I wanted to make again this year. I was getting very depressed thinking that I had lost these recipes forever. Then I remembered that I live in the 21st century. I was able to find the recipes for my cookies at Hershey's website. Mmmmm! I can't hardly wait for the weekend!
President Jimmy Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize today. This quote came from an article about the event on CNN:
"War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other's children."
My brother called me last night to ask about something that happened when we were children and living in Gregory Portland, Texas...
One dark and stormy night (yeah, it's a cliche, but it fits), we three kids were watching television in our living room. I can't remember what we were watching, but I get the feeling it was a scary or suspenseful made-for-tv movie. I'm not sure where Mom was, but I do remember that Dad was on the phone in their bedroom. A really good storm was cooking outside - you know the kind that are really thrilling, but also kinda scary...especially when you're 7-8 years old (me & Meredith) or 3 years old (Danny).Our house on Amistad faced a huge, empty circular park where we would occasionally play on the lone jungle gym or t-ball with the neighbors at the backstop. The backyard shared a common fence with the neighbor behind us. Suddenly, amidst the flashes of lightening lighting up our rear picture window, a strange, pulsing light appeared. It was obviously nothing related to the storm and it kinda freaked us out. I think we tried to talk to Dad about it, but he was on the phone and couldn't/wouldn't be bothered. So, we would continue to watch television, but we would put our backs to the window and slouch real low on the chair/couch. It was the old "if I pretend I don't see it, it will go away" logic mixed with an "if I can't see it, it's not there" attitude. That worked for maybe 5 minutes, when suddenly (and I'm almost positive this happened at a particularly tense place in our movie), the rear picture window practically exploded inward! PANIC! We ran screaming to Dad's bedroom...scared, but also with a "we told you something was up" demeanor - vindicated once again in our knowledge that yes we did know everything...
When Danny called last night to ask me about this incident, he was sure (or really hoping) that it had something to do with aliens. Sadly, from what I remember, the backyard neighbor had a sick child, no phones, and an out-of-town husband and was trying to get someone to help her deal. She originally tried to get our attention by flashing a flash light at us over the fence. When that didn't work, she started throwing rocks at the window, but the storm made it hard for us to hear them. She finally threw a really big rock, probably with more force than she intended. She got our attention alright! I'm pretty sure Dad would have helped her out, but I don't remember the whole process of getting the window fixed.
Thanks to Daniel for making me remember this incident. Meredith, Mom, Dad, I would love to hear what you remember about it.
This is in response to a brief conversation Elizabeth and I had about Senator Lott's recent gaffe:
This is what is wrong with the Republican party...or politics in general. You just can't trust what the politicians are saying. They will speak the words that make their audience/constituents feel good and then do whatever it is they or their major monitary contributors want. Kay Bailey Hutchinson says,
...(Lott) was trying to make a 100 year-old-man who was leaving the Senate after nearly 50 years feel good. He went overboard and he knows it.I actually believe this is probably true. Maybe I'm being naive, but I don't believe that Senator Lott is a racist. Lott was speaking from a political culture that taylors rhetoric to specific, narrow audiences. For example, we have a "compassionate conservative" president who approved of the execution of 185 Texas death row inmates as governor and now wants to go to war with Iraq to divert attention from his administrations failures such as their inability to capture Osama bin Laden, the negative direction the US economy is taking, and gross, willfull, extreme negligence/mismanagement of the environment...
I could say more...probaby should say more....but I've got to get some work done.
It bugs me that I don't update this journal in a timely way. So much has happened since my last post that I know I won't be able to write anything of quality to commemorate this Christmas season. Luckily, the other major players in my adventures (Stepan, Mom, Meredith, and Elizabeth) are much more faithful with their journals than I am. So if anybody is really curious about what I've been up to, you can follow the above links for a nicely detailed account. Also, by not being as diligent as I should have been, I can console/fool myself into believing that my first Christmas as a married woman was just too full to spare even a moment for journal work...conveniently forgetting about the countless hours spent playing that fiendishly addictive Bejewled and the Buffy-a-thon Stepan and I had last weekend.
Yes, my wonderful husband did wonderful things to my on-line journal last night. (It's okay, Dad, we're married now). Though I could wax euphoric for days on Stepan's technical abilities, I alse want to acknowledge that the work's not done yet. I still need to add links to the side menu and we need to fix the template for wrapping - you shouldn't have to scroll to the side to see the entire entry!
CNN has an article on CompuBug Dubious Achievement in Personal Computing Awards. I only mention it because the very first entry is about the new iMac that Stepan got right before Christmas. The entry about Windows XP is pretty amusing as well.
One of our clients sent each of the engineers here a bottle of champagne as a holiday gift. Well, one of our engineers (who is Muslim) doesn't drink alcohol so he donated his bottle to the office. We just took a champagne break and toasted all the good fortune we expect to have in 2003. Now nobody is fit to work and we are all going home early. We've also decided that we definitely need to have more champagne breaks in the future as we're all feeling mighty fine right now....it's amazing how quickly a small glass of bubbly will effect you!
Just in case I don't get to post again today - Happy New Year!!! Don't drink and drive....there are safe ride programs in cities all across the United States. It's definitely worth your while to look into what is available in your neighborhood.
