Entry the forty-fourth: My dad's shirt

First attempt at sending photos to my blog from my phone. New technology is scary. More later, but for now, the t-shirt I gave my dad for Christmas.

Front:

Back:

Entry the forty-third: Never Before Seen Photos

I can now post pictures of some Christmas gifts. Woo!

Freezer paper stenciled t-shirt I made for Mr. Elinoire (with usual Small Brown Cat included for scale purposes):



Front:



Back:



Some gift baskets:



Whew! That's enough for now, but more later, I promise.

Entry the forty-second: Another 15 things

To make up for my lack of posts during the last week (it's been a doozy of a week), I will post TWO things today. Don't fall over in shock. :-)

Here are the next 15 items in that list of stuff about myself:

16. With the exception of the-future-and-now-current Mr. Elinoire, the best roommates I ever had were ones I didn’t know before we shared a dorm room/apartment/house.
17. I am embarrassed to be as picky an eater as I am.
18. I think if you can hold your breath the entire time you are going through a tunnel, you get to make a wish.
19. I am mildly allergic to tomatoes, eggplant, walnuts, and swiss cheese, which all make my tongue itch.
20. I love swimming in the ocean but since I am extremely phobic about sharks, I don’t do it very often.
21. My favorite thing about ocean waves is when they are so strong that they knock you over and you have no idea which end is up until you float to the top.
22. I hated coconut until I was in college and then all of a sudden I loved it and it tasted the same as it always had.
23. I like to spell things the old fashioned way: cocoanut, cooky.
24. I like English English spellings of words, but I think it’s pretentious to use them if you’re writing in America.
25. I’m a packrat but I’m trying to reform.
26. Progress is slow.
27. I am not a Good Shopper.
28. I like using capital letters to emphasize certain words or phrases even though I know perfectly well that English grammar doesn’t really allow for That Sort Of Thing.
29. I am uncoordinated.
30. I don’t like talking on the phone.

Entry the forty-first and a half: Celebrate the season!

My mother's dog Strider helps with the whipped cream bowl.

Entry the forty-first: Is this numbering system too precious?

I liked it at first but as the number of posts goes up, maybe it's... ungainly. Anyone have any thoughts?

Entry the fortieth: In which I continue to do stuff that isn't work-related *or* The Resentful Doughnut – a holiday fable

Mr. Elinoire (via Instant Messaging): I got spam where the title is "resentful" and the first line is "doughnut". Sounds like a weird short story.

Elinoire: Once upon a time there was a donut. He was one of those plain, cake doughnuts that some adults like but most kids pass over in favor of the ones with rainbow sprinkles. The plain cake doughnut did not think that was fair. He was just as good -- No, better! -- than any of those decked out razzle dazzle sprinkled doughnuts. The cake doughnut's beauty was more than just skin deep. A customer came to the doughnut's store and decided to buy a dozen. He carefully chose the prettiest and yummiest of them and then, when the sales clerk said that he could have an extra to make it a "baker's dozen," the customer pointed to the cake doughnut and said "I might as well take that boring one. Someone might want it." The cake doughnut was placed at the bottom of the box and by the time it was opened by the customer and the customer's friends, the cake doughnut was squished. No one ate it.

The end.

Entry the thirty-ninth: In which I sometimes goof off when I should be working

This morning, on the way to work:

Elinoire: That fire truck we just passed is really shiny.
Mr. Elinoire: It just got behind us. I think it’s following us.
Elinoire: Uh…
Mr. Elinoire: It’s still there. It’s definitely following us.
Elinoire: Are you on fire?
Mr. Elinoire: Uh…
Elinoire: Because you aren’t paranoid if you’re really on fire.

And now that meme is stuck in my head.

“You’re not paranoid if the enemy really has hired psychics."
“You’re not paranoid if they’re really out of coffee.”
“You’re not paranoid if the birds are deliberately aiming for your car.”

Entry the thirty-eighth: Um...

I saw this tonight in a high-end antique/decor shop in a fairly posh neighborhood:



These rabbit figurines are two separate objects. Surely this is not what the manufacturer had in mind. Did someone intentionally place them just so? Do they look wildly different (and, you know, less provocative) when viewed from inside the store instead of through the window?

The situation doesn't improve from this angle:



Perhaps the store has an employee with a grudge.

Entry the thirty-seventh: Baking insanity

No, no, I'm not perfecting a recipe for insanity on a cookie sheet; I've gone insane and baking is my way of expressing it. ("Gone," you say? "What is this 'gone' Elinoire speaks of? Hasn't she already been there for as long as I've known her?") Ahem.

Proof of my mental condition:



"That," you might say to yourself, "is a whole lot of banana bread." And you'd be right. (About the quantity. I'm just pretending I didn't hear that earlier comment about how long I have or have not been crazy.) Especially if you were including the eight loaves still in the oven. It's ridiculous. And even a little bizarre because banana bread is not a traditional December goodie.

(Not that I think you wouldn't be muttering to yourself if I baked twenty-seven loaves of fruitcake.)

But I digress.

Here is the reason I bake and distribute banana bread every December:



These are bananas that were bought during the last year and then ignored for a just a little too long. I like bananas that are tinged with green and my husband likes them when they're all yellow with maybe one or two brown spots. These were left in the fruit bowl until they became spotty and unappealing (to us, anyway) and then tossed in the back of the freezer. That's why they're totally brown now and even a little frosty. When they're thawed they're perfect for baking.

Except these are the bananas I had left over after my bout of baking insanity. These are the extra bananas that ended up in my parents' composter.

We're definitely buying smaller bunches in 2007.

Entry the thirty-sixth: Fifteen things

I'm in the middle of one of those self-involved but (hopefully) amusing "Hundred things about me" lists, but I'm just going to post the facts in groups of fifteen. I'm hoping this will mollify me when I can't post pictures of presents I'm working on. Plus, it draws this out. That's good, right? Yeah, I don't know either.

1. I wish I could see some of my very best friends more often. I hate that I live so far away from them.
2. I love gingerbread.
3. And really good strawberries.
4. I get annoyed about trivial things way too easily.
5. Like people who talk during movies. I am so easily annoyed that I don’t go to the movies very often anymore.
6. One of my earliest memories is of being underwater and seeing the surface above but not being able to get to it until my dad pulled me out.
7. That was in Loch Ness but, as far as I know, no monsters were involved.
8. I am always surprised when lake water is fresh, not salty.
9. I am impatient.
10. I am a Taurus but I don’t believe in astrology.
11. I love John Waters’ essays but his movies are usually too rude for me.
12. I get tense when people on TV or in movies are in embarrassing situations.
13. I don’t mind traveling on my own.
14. Sometimes I prefer it.
15. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

Plus, for no reason, here is a picture of my husband taking a picture of our cats.

Entry the thirty-fifth: In which I am really, really tired

I still have cookies waiting to be iced. Hmph. This after two days of diligent work. I really did make a lot of dough this year -- I shouldn't be as surprised as I am that this process is taking friggin' FOREVER.

No pictures from yesterdays bake-a-thon with tyee and her lovely babbling (in a good way) daughter, but I took a few tonight.

The production line: I like to work on several cookies at a time; this year I wised up and started using a lazy susan.



An hour or two later...



And, finally, the aftermath.



Did I mention I'm not done yet? AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

(The aforementioned tyee gave me the idea for both the hula girls and the light-swagged & Christmas-treed houses. Thanks tyee!)

Entry the thirty-fourth: Your anonymity is safe with me

After hearing a friend tell me she couldn't post comments to my blog because she didn't have a Blogger account, I did a little poking around. Turns out I was blocking anonymous comments without realizing it. Whoops.

That feature's been switched off so non-bloggers may now comment to their heart's content. :-)

Entry the thirty-third: Snags

On an almost daily basis, Sylvie attempts to perch on the towel bar on the back of the bathroom door. She is rarely successful, but she keeps making the attempt. Maybe it's that variable reinforcement thing. Every once in a great while we get this:



And there is much rejoicing.

Nine times out of ten, however, we get a small brown cat hanging from the towel like a monkey. Admittedly, it's amusing... but this is the unfortunate result:



Snags. Snags in EVERY SINGLE TOWEL we own. My sister's boyfriend stayed with us for one night last month and I had to empty the linen cupboard before I found the last untouched-by-paws-and-claws towel cowering in the back. And Sylvie? Unrepentant. Even when I tell her This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things.

It's like she doesn't understand a word I'm saying. Or perhaps understands one or two of them, but can tell from my tone I'm not conveying any information she would find interesting.

Entry the thirty-second: It starts...

What, you ask? What is starting, exactly?

Holiday baking, that's what.



Except very little actual baking occurred tonight. I used my wonderful KitchenAid mixer (one of the best birthday presents ever!) to put together um... hold on, I'm counting on my fingers... SEVEN batches of gingerbread cookie dough. My husband thought I was kidding when I told him to buy 5 jars of molasses -- Ha!

My husband set the cat bed up in the kitchen doorway and first Mirabelle then Sylvie obligingly smooshed into it. I feel sure they were cheering me on.



Next week I will descend upon my parents' (larger, nicer, more modern) kitchen like a gingerbread dervish and roll out and bake all this dough. My parents don't mind this because
1. It's a nice way to hang out
2. Their house ends up smelling like gingerbread
3. They get to eat all the mistakes and extra bits.

My mother really likes it when I appropriate their lovely double oven for my cookie madness. The ensuing cheer always knocks the "They-put-Christmas-stuff-up-in-the-stores-in-August-and-that's-just-wrong,-wrong,-WRONG" grouchy mood out of my dad. Once he's experienced the healing power of baking cookies, he brings the boxes of Christmas decorations in from the garage. My mom can never make any headway in this department before baking day.



Happy December!

Entry the thirty-first: Someone else's art

My current favorite blog is Kevin Cornell's bearskinrug. Kevin Cornell is an illustrator and a goofball (in the best possible way, of course) and his site is full of odd little corners to poke into. Over Thanksgiving weekend, I made my entire family play with The Bear (top right corner of the screen on this page) and I bought myself a t-shirt, despite the fact that I'm trying not to spend money on myself during this expensive time of year. So much for that resolution.

Clearly, I am helpless against the power of the sock monkey.*

In other news, Valerie told me that someone is studying Internet meme velocity. It's an intriguing idea. I am eager to see the results.

*Truth is, normally I'm not such a fan of sock monkeys. But Mojo, the one on bearskinrug, is another matter entirely. And he's on a t-shirt.