The Christmas Card-2003

I love our Christmas cards. Every year, we go through our limited supply of pictures and chose the best to grace our card. I spend long hours thinking of something witty to write on the inside (and then come up with it after I place the order) and then we go to Starbucks and address, stamp and mail them out.







Love the pixilation. This is our first card. For Halloween that year we themed out and presented ourselves as an all American family. Little Yummy Bear (now age 5) is a bald eagle sucking his thumb. The others are self explanatory. Inside was the smarmy poem:

It started as a costume
Of feathers, felt and glue.
Now Liberty and Freedom
And Uncle Sam want you
To share the holiday spirit
as the year turns new,
And have a Merry Christmas
From the three of us to you.

Every Halloween my MIL offers to take our pic for the card. This is the only time we used a Halloween picture, and the only time adults appear on the card.

Update

$600.00

That's the cost of my car repairs.

Merry Christmas to me.

Carbon Monoxide or Hypothermia?

Businessman: Hello?
Me: Hey, when you drove the car this morning, did it smell like gasoline?
B: Uh, no.
Me: Hmm, maybe it's the car I'm driving behind.

This conversation happened while I was driving thirty miles away to a kid's birthday party. While on the interstate, the smell dissipated.

When the party was over, someone offered to start my car for me to warm it up. Five minutes later, I got in the car and almost gagged on the fumes. A quick check outside showed exhaust coming out of the tail pipe, so I didn't think it was clogged. However, every time I stopped at a light I was inundated with fumes. I called the Businessman and explained the situation. His suggestion:

"Promise me you'll crack the windows."

Of course this sounds ridiculously smart, except for one problem: the temperature outside was -5 degrees. Not a typo.

When I got our slightly blue children home (blue from cold, I assume, and not asphyxiation) he noted that my car made the garage smell like gas.

So, guess who gets to drive my car this week?

Membership

I joined a gym this week.

Yesterday I was trying to get Vicious dressed so we could go to the gym while 5yo was in school. He started crying because he wanted to go to the gym too.

So I went twice.

I wonder how long the kids will enjoy the play area.

Don't Kill the Cat

I received a sly little present in the mail today. From a devoted reader.

You're all curious aren't you? All three of you.

You'll just have to wait until I have a chance to try out my new. . .item. I live with people who are not worthy of such largess but I may indulge myself a little.

Zap

My neighbor got a new toy last year, a snowblower, and didn't get to use it. We got snow last week and I smiled to myself when I heard his toy start up. Gradually the noise got louder and louder and then there was a horrible grinding noise and the snowblower stopped. Ten seconds later there was a knock on my door.

"I was blowing your driveway and I ran over your extension cord (for the Christmas lights). Could you unplug it for me?"

!!! I rushed into the garage, unplugged the cord and then ran out to assess the damage. The cord managed to get wound around the barrel three times and was frayed in a couple places. He tugged and untangled but couldn't free it.

Enter Super-Homemaker. This operation was very similar to extracting yarn from a vacuum. I did it with finesse and a flourish.

And I am thankful the man didn't electrocute himself in my driveway.

How nice it is to have a neighbor who'll do nice things though.

Revolting

I brushed my teeth with baking soda today.

I tried to multitask last night and search for my iPod downstairs while brushing my teeth with my toothbrush. It automatically shuts off after two and a half minutes which seems an eternity unless I'm multitasking. I eventually found my iPod and brought it upstairs but left the toothbrush downstairs.

This morning, while doing my usual control-the-chaos-of-getting-the-kid-ready-for-school, I realized my toothbrush was downstairs, but my toothpaste was upstairs. In a pinch, I used baking soda. I should have climbed the stairs. Not only do my teeth not feel clean, but I almost tossed my cookies in the kitchen sink. Lovely.

Toothbrush is back in his home. Baking soda is back among my cleaning supplies.

We (baking soda and I) will never speak of this again.

Now It's Just Redundant

I saw yet another lady from my old colorguard today. That makes four in the past two months.

Since fate is filling in the holes with very little effort from me, I'll make a wishlist of missing links I'd like to find:

The one from Illinois who graduated a year before me
My co-caption
The red-headed guard instructor
My waistline

Well, that last one will probably need a LOT of effort from me.

The Economy

I know someone facing possible foreclosure. In fact, among the five of us that were offering moral support, we knew four families facing this problem.

One lady asked: Why can't the government just insist that the banks stop raising the ARM rates?

I usually ponder questions like this and try to see the other side and this time I can't.

Why do the banks have to raise interest rates on ARMS right now? Wouldn't it be better for them to still receive a smaller mortgage payment than a foreclosed home?

It wouldn't solve our economy, but it would help out thousands of families. That can't be bad.

Or am I ignorant of something?

He's Back!

My 5yo has been strangely charming. He's generous with unsolicited "I love you"s. He's doing all his chores and some of mine. On rare occasions, he's nice to his brother.

Which led me to realize...

The original Big Brother is back.

Parents everywhere who spend a big chunk of the year using every discipline in the book and inventing some that aren't now have their work made easy:

Santa is watching.

In the time it takes a two year old to climb on top of the refrigerator; in the time it takes a three year old to lock his parents out of the house so he can eat all the yogurt; in the time it takes a four year old pretending to be a cat to try using the kitty's potty (all of the above are true stories, though not all mine, and all happened in a ridiculously short amount of time); those three words practically guarantee good behavior.

Santa is watching. Let the holidays begin.

Potsticker Salad

My family loves potstickers. Rarely I make them from scratch, more often I buy a bag of them frozen and pull out as needed.

They can be high on calories though, especially since I could eat about 15 in one sitting.

So I went to workout with the Businessman (his gym is giving free guest passes until January) and I was starving, but I didn't want to betray all my efforts of the previous hour. We both agreed this salad should be in the permanent rotation. It is ridiculously easy.

Dipping sauce/Dressing:
Equal amounts soysauce and rice vinegar
Chili oil to taste.

Salad:
One bag of Broccoslaw
Potstickers, cooked your favorite way (see directions on bag)

Steam the broccoslaw in the microwave about four minutes until tender. Decide whether to cut your potstickers into bite size chunks or leave them whole. Toss them, the slaw and some dressing together.

You could also add shredded carrots, tofu, water chestnuts, whatever. The idea here is to make a salad out of a potsticker filling.

If you don't have potstickers on hand you could also cook some pasta (rotini comes to mind) and fry it in a little oil until it's crunchy and toss that in. I would add more fixins to the salad though, so it really was more like potsticker filling.

A Little Love to a Soldier

I mentioned before that I have a friend in Iraq. I can't imagine being in her shoes. She has two small children and is several thousand miles away from her family. We decided we wanted to help make her Christmas special.

She requested some "pretty slippers" to hang out in. With soles. I made her some.


She's also a quilter so I found some pretty fabric (at least I thought it was pretty) as well as some special fabric that you can print on. I don't know if she has access to a printer, but if she does she can print some pics of her kids and make a quilt around them.

I also included a quilting magazine, a puzzle magazine, some biscotti (thanks for the suggestion), some taffy (a rememberance from visiting her when she had a massive pregnancy craving), and hope that she'll be home soon.

I mailed it and have since learned that she might have liked coffee. I didn't know her coffee capabilties at the time or I would have hooked her up.

Maybe I'll send another package in a couple months.

The Vish

My 2yo becomes a 3yo today. He is headstrong, adventurous and daring--all traits that can be traced directly back to the Businessman. He has a mop of curly blond hair and a darling Germanic face--attributes from me I suppose. (Yes I know I have brown hair, but just look at my baby pictures.) He is into anything extreme: Hockey, skateboarding, BMX, flight and skydiving. He asked to go skiing for Christmas, well, skijumping but we'll start with skiing.

For his birthday we got him a helmet.

I love you Vicious. Happy Birthday!

Daring bakers-November

This month's challenge involved a lot of suger. I meant to make it. I really did. It was a Caramel Cake by Shuna Fish Lydon. The hostesses of this month's challenge were http://culinarycuriosity.blogspot.com/, http://blondieandbrownie.blogspot.com/, and http://forayintofood.blogspot.com/. There was an optional recipe for vanilla caramels.

Caramel Cake with Caramelized Butter Frosting courtesy of Shuna Fish Lydon (http://eggbeater.typepad.com/), as published on Bay Area Bites (http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/).

Golden Vanilla Bean Caramels from Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich, Artisan Press, Copyright 2007, ISBN: 978-1579652111

This month's rules entail that I must cite my sources. I always try to do this anyway but this month they have a program that will scan all our blogs and make sure we complied.

So anyway, I didn't make the cake. I had lots of other baking going on and I didn't want to risk having to bake numerous times because of my altitude adjustments. Also, judging by the way I polished off my caramels, the last thing I needed in my house was an entire cake.

But I did make the caramels.

There are altitude adjustments to be made with candy as well. But they are far more obvious:

Water boils at 212 degrees at sea level. Here it boils at 185 degrees (according to my thermometer, which is what I'm calibrating). That's a difference of 27 degrees. I simply have to adjust all the candy temps by 27 degrees. There may be other adjustments, but this simple math worked for this recipe. I calibrate this everytime I make candy.

A few years ago I bought a marble tile at Home Depot. I don't remember the cost, maybe $5.00, but check out the price of marble slabs in a kitchen store and you'll see my brilliance. Marble helps disperse the uber-heat of candy. For this recipe I simply placed my baking dish on the slab. When the caramel was set, I pulled it out of the pan and slapped on the marble and started cutting.

It was yummy! A little too hard for me--I felt like I might pull out a filling at any time, but that did not stop us from eating it (probably because no one else in my family has fillings!).

hard Work Does Pay Off

I have a friend who can draw. Actually I have a few friends who can draw, but this one is recently published.

People who can draw amaze me. I can whip up a sketch a toddler can recognize, and I'm decent at pictionary (although there was that time that I got "glue" and drew a bottle of Elmer's complete with thier bull logo and rocket shaped, ridged cap and no one on my team believed that Elmer's had a bull in thier logo) but I cannot draw the way some of my friends can. I cannot even imagine how they do some of the things they do.

Back to my friend. When we were in college she wanted to illustrate children's books. That was one of her big dreams.

Her dream came true.

I'm so happy for her.

Am I being Irrational?

My mom gave me some birthday money which I decided to put toward a Wii game I had been eyeing. The game Sucks. With a capital S.

So I composed the following emails:

To Target:
I can respect a return policy. For the most part, I understand why certain policies exist. However, in an effort to prevent dishonesty, you are hurting honest people.

I purchased a Wii video game earlier this week. After playing it once, I hated it. The quality of the game was awful and I regretted buying it. So I tried to return or exchange it for a different game. Alas, your policy doesn't allow this.

I know why you have this policy. But returning this game is the only way I, as a consumer, can tell the mfr their game is awful. If I had purchased a toy, and it fell apart immediately, I could return it. If I bought clothing and the seams ripped the first time I wore it, I could return it. If I bought an appliance that didn't quite fit my lifestyle, I could return it. But I can't return this game.

There should be a way that I, as an honest consumer, can get my money back, or at least exchange it for a game made by a more reputable mfr.

Target recommended I contact the manufacturer:

I recently got the Wii Fit and shortly afterward, decided to research what sort of games are out there for this platform. I found your game and decided it was exactly what I was looking for.

I am dissappointed. The game quality is poor. The interaction between the Wii controller and the game is inconsistant. And the unlockable fitness tips are unoriginal. After playing the game once, I was afraid my copy was broken. After playing twice, and searching product reviews, I concluded I can't blame myself for this one.

What really irks me is that there seems to be no way to get my money back. When I tried to return or exchange at Target, I was reminded of their store policy, and they suggested I contact you. You will probably ignore my email, and enjoy the money I gave you.

The problem of course, is that the dishonest people out there have made it impossible for the honest among us to tell you how poorly designed this game is.

Your bottom line is not affected by my opinion. As a consumer, I want to speak with my dollars. I want my money back.

I could probably get my money back by taking bets on if they'll give me my money back.

Let's Hear It For the Boys

The boys in my family are playing with a whoopie cushion.

Businessman: You know, there is a real irony about the whoopie cushion.
Me: Oh?
B: Yeah, you blow it up, put it under someone's butt, then blow it up again. It's like you're constantly kissing someone's butt.
Me: No, it's like you are kissing someone's butt. I don't get near that thing.

Query: How is that ironic?

Never Thought of it That Way

Last Spring, a speaker at a women's group I go to talked to us about making our own natural cleaning products. I have been making my own cleansers ever since.

She came back this Fall and gave another great presentation.

On the heels of this, we all got the stomach flu. The Businessman came home with Lysol and Windex because he wanted to "do a good cleaning." After my 10 seconds of deep breathing so I wouldn't bite his head off, I quoted our speaker:

"If it's flammable and/or toxic, it should not be used in your kitchen."

Good point.

The Nastiness that is Motherhood

***Warning: this post contains subject matter not appropriate for anyone who has a sensitive stomach.

I was bundling my kids up to take 5yo to the bus stop. While trying to stuff 3yo into his jacket he kept squirming. Once he was bundled up, I gave him a big hug.

Me: I love hugging you when you're snuggly. I could just gobble you up!
3yo: Mom! Don't eat me!
5yo: She won't eat you, she doesn't eat blood.
Me: (Assuming this was a reference to vegetarianism) Do you eat blood?
5yo: Yes, in some of my boogers.

Yet this is the same kid who won't eat half of my cooking.

This is Why I Don't Knit for Boys

I sat down to hash out Christmas gifts in October. Imagine my delight to find I didn't need to do anymore knitting! Now it's mid/late November and I have the following (self-inflicted) obligations:

A helmet liner for an anonymous soldier
Felted clogs for a soldier I know
As many felted clogs as possible for an auction

I find myself knitting as quickly as possible, carrying it to the bus stop, sticking it in the car just in case I have to stop for a train...

And to top it all off, my 5yo lost the skull and crossbone hat I made him this fall.

He wore it twice.