Moving day!

Meals this week: from noodles to hazelnut cookies.

This will (I promise) be the last post before the redesign. Here’s a sneak peak:

What is that?  That’s why they call it a sneak peak….  get stoked.

In other news, I actually went grocery shopping today with a real live grocery list. For a real live meal plan.  It’s apparently Smitten Kitchen week in my kitchen — I asked Eric to find food he wanted to eat, and he went to Deb’s site exclusively.

Monday:  Peanut Sesame Noodles (this recipe only minus cucumber and hot instead of cold)

Tuesday: Stuffed mushrooms from Savor Washington, recipe re-posted here on our total failure at a newlywed blog.

Wednesday: Baked rigatoni with mini meatballs

Thursday: Leftovers

Friday: Pizza and stuff.

Baking agenda:  Hazelnut chocolate thumbprint cookies. I think it’s safe to say these are what I’m most looking forward to this week.

 

I will also hopefully be cooking up a cycling cap (with ears!) for Eric in the near future out of a blue flannel shirt.

Look for the redesign in the next day or two!

<3

Our first Christmas tree….

First of all, aren’t I a tease?  I promised exciting changes and a redesign, and none of it’s happened.  What gives?  Well, the main reason is that WordPress is being infuriatingly confusing for no reason.  But I promise this is still in the works.  Maybe it will be a Christmas present, although I hope it comes sooner than that!

Speaking of Christmas….  All the God stations have started playing Christmas music, but two things about this have bothered me:

1) All the songs about Santa.  Enough said.

2) The song “Christmas Shoes.”  This song bothers me so much that I thought about it nearly all day yesterday. There are SO many things wrong with it, from the trite and rather unbelievable story line to the cliche and maudlin lyrics.  The rhymes are forced.  The melody sounds poorly crafted to fit a bad poem.  The guy who sings it doesn’t sound that great.  And what child, especially a boy, knows what size shoes his mother wears?  If the writer had left that little detail out no one would have questioned it, but the lyrics “these shoes are just her size” necessarily call into question the integrity of the poet.  I’ve read that this song is allegedly based on a real event… but whose?  Tell me, because I’ve got some bad news for you… You may not be aware, but someone totally botched your story.  Like, badly. But the worst part of the song?  As I listened, scoffing, to the first verse and chorus incredulous of its completely overdone sentiment, I felt a little catch in the back of my throat and my face got tight.  I don’t know if I’ve ever felt such conflicting emotions, other than the time I almost broke my nose on Eric’s elbow and was laughing and sobbing hysterically.

I digress.  What was this post supposed to be about anyway? Oh yes, our tree.

Now it’s not our first Christmas, but it is our first tree.  Last year we did not get a tree, mostly because we were very penniless and partly because we were leaving town for Christmas anyway.  This year we’re still leaving town for Christmas, and we’re still pretty penniless, but Eric has a job.  We decided to express our gratitude for this job by being a real married couple and buying a Christmas tree.

So, we got out our saw and bought a tree-gathering license and headed out to the forest…. just kidding.  We hopped in the Corolla and headed down to the Home Depot, where we scored this cutie for $13.  It was a cheater — it’s technically over 4 feet tall, but since its top is so weird and most self-respecting tree buyers would have lobbed it off, it was placed with the 2-4 foot trees and thus was cheaper.  Our kind of tree.

So far, Kieran has decided the tree stand is his new water dish, has batted around half of our ornaments (there are only 5), and bitten our lights, causing half of them to go out until I found the right one to twist. I can’t wait to come home and find that he’s knocked the entire tree over. What a child.

Without further adieu, here it is.  Our first little Christmas tree:

Oh, hello there.

What shall I say today, since my mind insists on being in not-coming-up-with-clever-things-to-say mode?  How about not a thing.   I’ll let others say it best, who have gone before me.

Now I’m not one of those “quote people.” (You know the ones.)  But I do enjoy wisdom, irony, and cleverness.  And today I was looking up quotations by literary icons as candidates for the backs of my soon-to-come substitute teaching business cards.  Here were some I liked.

From the uber-masculine Papa, some words, soft and deep:

“All good books have one thing in common — they are truer than if they had really happened.” & “All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”

From the sweet, solemn, and sometimes cranky Emily:

“A word is dead when it is said, some say.  I say it just begins to live that day.”

From that one dude, T.S. (Only because it would make him angry be disregarded so.  And you can bet in this quote he is talking about his own…):

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

From the happy and haphazard Jack Kerouac:

“Maybe that’s what life is… a wink of the eye and winking stars.”