Here’s looking at you

Instead of being a productive human being during the days between Christmas and New Year’s, I've been hanging out logging much pajama time, taking a break from non-fiction with Julie Powell of the Julie/Julia Project and catching up on the many episodes I've missed of Mad Men. I can’t even say the loafing has been all that creative, but boy has it been fun.



Mostly I've been so preoccupied lately that I've missed a lot of the presidential candidate debates (Can we call them that? Ten people on a stage raising their hands in response to a question is not a debate – it's a dumbed-down version of Miss America. I mean really. Post-9/11, when Pakistan is literally exploding, our image is crap in a huge part of the world and people in New Orleans are still living in freakin' trailers, not to mention having no health insurance and knowing their kids probably aren't learning what they need to know in school, don't we deserve something better that that?

Yes, I'm on my high horse, but sometimes it's just absolutely astonishing what we accept as normal in this country. But who am I to talk? I'm not teaching kids to read in Appalachia or something, and the money I give to UNICEF isn't exactly going to fix Darfur, so I should shut up, for heaven's sakes.). I don't know the specifics of Hillary Clinton's health care plan and I don't know what Barack Obama's response is to Joe Biden's idea that Iraq should be split into thirds.

I am an embarrassment of a former political reporter. For a long time I worried that I'd be climbing the walls if I weren't freezing half to death in Iowa and New Hampshire, or if I'd be worth anything if I couldn't get Mitt Romney's media guy to return my phone calls. Now I know. Admittedly, I miss watching the stump speeches and that cold fresh-air high that's oddly a little like altitude sickness mixed with excitement while watching the process. But I've ended up with something better than I could've hoped for – a life.

Not the one I thought I'd have, and not certainly one that needs some work (Chase, I swear some day that balance will be zero – just not yet.). But it's a step -- and something that other people have always seemed to be able to figure out far better than I. And hackneyed as I am, I'm grateful for every second – not least of which for Rick's giant leap of faith, which totally changed everything this year. And our friends rock.

Now I need to take a walk, catch another episode of Mad Men, and get back to everyone else's 2007 Top Ten lists.

Happy New Year.

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Flour power

We've been taking in the usual assortment of Christmas goodies the past couple weeks -- a shipment of candy from Lisa's mom in Milwaukee (including the mysterious substance known as fairy food) here, a loaf of bread from my sister-in-law there.

We also have a couple dozen of our own cookies still lying around. But we -- and by "we" I mean mostly Lisa -- have been keeping up our end of the supply chain up as well. I spent much of last weekend in awe of the sheer number of cookies that came out of our kitchen -- enough baked goods to make Mrs. Field go, "Damn, that's a lot of cookies."

After the jump, a rundown.

These numbers are approximate, but suffice to say that we completely covered the dining room table with plates and boxes of cookies and nuts. To wit:

7 dozen chocolate mint cookies

7 dozen pepperming sugar cookies

6 dozen oatmeal-white chocolate-cranberry

6 dozen oatmeal-pistachio-cranberry-apricot

5 (or maybe 6) dozen peanut butter Kiss cookies

4 pounds or so Union Square spiced nuts

And, oh yeah, 3 pounds or so of sugared pecans.

I really wish I'd taken a picture of the dining room table. Bad blogger. But to those of you who got them, hope you like them. I think they're pretty darn good.

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This is what snow looks like

The other day at Target, I bought a snow scraper/brush combo for my car. Good timing -- see above.

OK, so I'm stretching a little there. The snow that fell on my car this morning was gone by midafternoon, and the snow that fell on it tonight will be gone too -- hell, it's gonna be 60 by Saturday.

But damn if I wasn't happy to see the first snow of the season -- and my first personal snow since, oh, 1997.

Before today, it had been a little more than a decade since there had been a chance of snow falling in the place where I lived. I could see it on the mountains around Los Angeles some winters there, but it was three cross-country moves ago that I last had to have a scraper in my trunk.

So this morning I went out and took pictures of it snowing, and I caught a couple of flakes on my tongue and I generally behaved like a little kid. I'll probably re-acquire my distaste for snow over the next few months, but for now it's very exciting. Can't wait to fire my first snowball.

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