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Christmas List part 2

3. A pony

4. A stockpot

Technically I own a stockpot. I received it for Christmas a few years ago.  Then I made soup for a friend and left my stockpot at his house and kept forgetting to retrieve it and frankly at this point I think he's had it longer than I have.  So I'd feel better just calling it a loss and getting a new one.  And I miss making stock.  I find it therapeutic. 

Sancta Lucia

Today is the feast day of Saint Lucia.  She was an early Christian martyr, who was meant to be burned at the stake, but (wait for it...wait for it..) wouldn't burn.  Her feast day is celebrated mostly in Scandinavia, in the way that all the best saint's days are celebrated, by baking! 

My family is not the least bit Scandinavian, but my mom has a very close Swedish friend who had kids our age.  Consequently we had Swedish au pairs and celebrated Santa Lucia.  We make pepparkokar and saffron buns.  It's loads of fun and a full day's work once you throw in dough cooling and dough rising.  Also our recipe for pepparkokar makes enough cookies for a small country, so there are plenty to go around.  The saffron bun recipe does not make as much and is sometimes best when doubled, so there are no fights.

When we were little, we used to do the whole procession with the crown, bringing breakfast to my parents.  That doesn't happen anymore, since none of us live at home except for the dog and he would eat all the cookies before they got to my parents.  Still, we have two of the plastic crowns and do trot them out on occasion.  The tradition says that the eldest daughter wears the crown, but I think it was found that with two girls, two crowns were better.  I've only worn real candles once or twice for school presentations.  There's a brilliant picture of me in fourth grade in a white robe, crown of candles and the most wonderful scowl on my face.  I like to think that is the appropriate expression when you have fire on your head.

Things get lax as we get older.  This year we haven't done any baking and it probably won't happen until the weekend.  But it is the thought that counts.

More information is here and the song sung during the procession is here. 

Ceci n'est pas un post.

I have a cold.  I'm not happy about it.  I am drugged to the gills and don't really have a clear grasp of time or space.  I almost banned someone from gmail chat last night for asking me what I wanted to do (hint: stay curled up on the couch with a cup of hot water, lemon and honey) and they had presents for me (normal reaction: Yay, prezzies!). 

I've had to come to work Monday and today, but am trying not to stay too long and not to cough or sneeze on anyone.  I still haven't decided if I'm going to journal club, but I think I would fall asleep.

On the plus side, I have discovered the wonder and majesty of Kleenex Ultra Soft tissues.  They rock hard-core.

Nu är det jul igen

I really love Christmas.  My family always makes a big deal of it and I don't really have any bad Christmas stories.  One of my favorite things is Christmas carols (okay, Christmas carols, cookies, decorations, shopping - all favorites). 

My family has some absolutely brilliant Christmas records (and I should probably mention that it is all actual vinyl, lest anyone think we've bought a Christmas record in the last 20 years).  There are some typical classical sorts.  There's the version of Placido Domingo singing "Mary's Boy Child", calypso beats and all.  We have a five record set of Reader's Digest Christmas records.  That one has some choice selections, including a version of "Happy Holidays", which sounds like it should be sung by the chorus girls of a Busby Berkeley film and a version of "O Little Town of Bethlehem", which is solely remarkable because it skips and we have the skips memorized and sing along, "for Christ is born of Mary...(hiccup)...while shepherds sleep". 

The real highlight of the collection is our album of Swedish Christmas carols, probably our favorite because we can't understand a damn thing they're saying, so we make up our own words, thus "nu är det jul igen" became "Limbley, Indiana".  I could claim that it made sense at the time, but I have no idea when that time was.  So I present three selections:

The classic: Sancta_Lucia

And:  Hej_Tomte_Gubbar

And my personal favorite: Nur är det jul igen

Enjoy!

Where Is My Mind?

Those are just some of the many true words sung by Frank Black (only second to "this monkey's gone to heaven) and I have been feeling them quite acutely lately.  I have that unshakable feeling that I'm forgetting something.  I keep thinking that something is that I'm meant to present journal club next week and so I open the schedule again and again somehow expecting my date to change from December 18th to December 12th.  It doesn't happen, so I search through my email looking for a schedule change, but it's not there.  I've sunk to the lowest level of the broken-minded and emailed the guy who organizes journal club, just to confirm that my delusions are wrong.  I can't very well be expected to trust myself, now can I?

Sparky!

This world is a scary, dangerous place filled with evil-doers.  I know this because my TV told me so.  Apparently, among the many things of which I was not aware, there has been a recent spate of attacks by contractors.  No really.  A commercial said so.  I hadn't seen it for a while and thought that maybe it had gone away, but last night it was back.

In a serious fake new style, a man informs me that a Florida woman was killed by contractors working on her home (which is patently absurd - it's entirely possible that someone might kill contractors working on their home, say the second time they bring the glass for glass-fronted cabinets and when it doesn't fit, promise to come back with new glass, still refusing to remeasure because maybe it would be easier to cut glass that fits the first time, instead of cutting the glass to where the darts fall or to the spread of some football game - thankfully, it's my parents' kitchen, not mine) and that another family had valuables stolen by a contractor. 

Luckily these dangers can be averted by using contractors who possess a technical seal of safety ID card (although it is entirely possible that the malicious contractors stalk good contractors to steal their ID cards, alter the name or picture and continue to perpetrate their evil on an unsuspecting public - Dear God, how will I sleep at night now!).  The commercial advises hiring contractors from Mr. Electric, whose telephone number is (something, something - okay, apparently I wasn't paying that much attention to the commercial) SPARKY-6 and if that doesn't inspire confidence, I don't know what will. 

I'm just thankful that where I live, I only have to tell the front desk and maintenance usually fixes things within a day.  Which they'll totally do for my pilot light, once I finish scrubbing off my stove, so they can enter my kitchen.

I tolerate a White Christmas

I'm not so good at following directions or reading the writing prompts, so I'm writing about the weather a couple days late. I don't think anyone will mind. Who doesn't love talking about the weather?

 I'm a fair-weather fan of White Christmases and snow in general. It's lovely when it falls. I love to watch it. I loved it when school was cancelled. Once when I was a kid, a bunch of us tried to manually shovel the snow back across the road, so our school bus couldn't get in (of course we realized that our time was better spent building toboggan runs), which was pretty stupid and futile, but fun.

 I don't like snow after about two days. By then there's no more White Christmas. You have the Yellow Christmas, from the dogs. Grey Christmas, from the exhaust. And generally a brown slushy mess.

 It's also not so much fun because on Christmas Day my family either travels or has family visit. Snow and driving do not mix in the DC area. Like power tools and tequila. Only more dangerous. I remember one year when it took about two hours to get home from my aunt's house. The roads themselves were not in great shape, but the real challenge was the hills. The most direct route to my parent's house was closed because cars were sliding down a hill and we had to go quite far out of our way to find an open road. The three of us may have sung Christmas carols the entire time, just to make things extra special fun for our parents. We're thoughtful like that.

 Everything aside, I do like snow and was beginning to feel a bit peevish about the whole 70 degree weather on December 1st. In some parts of the world, that is right and good, but this is not one of those places. Let me tell you, if I didn't know this whole global warming thing was utter bunk, I'd be worried.

My Christmas List

1. A new digital camera (see previous post)

2. One of those nice carts I had for carrying my groceries when I lived in Paris.  Rather like this one (Elder Store?  How awesome is that!), since I used to have a plaid cart.

Urban grocery shopping was much easier in Paris.  There were local stores.  In my neighborhood now, I have an overpriced market.  There is a grocery store about 15 minutes away.  There are two up a metro stop.  Getting more picky, Whole Foods is three metro stops away and I have to change trains to get to Trader Joe's, where I shop, if I have my druthers.  It means I do these bizarre grocery calculations. 

If I buy milk and orange juice, I can't buy chicken stock and canned tomatoes because that would be too heavy.  Large bags of onions, potatoes, sugar, flour, etc must be bought on separate trips or else my arms fall off before I get home. 

Yes, there are other ways to get home than metro, but they're really inconvenient.  Flexcar/Zipcar are too expensive for grocery shopping, as are cabs.  I definitely don't have a problem with the bus, but I don't leave work until at least 6 P.M. and buses don't run so frequently after 7.   

Large totes are useful, but doesn't quite solve the weight problem.  Therefore, the shopping cart.  And I can pretend that the plaid has some sort of geek chic thing going on, even though it's really just geeky.

Camera phone holiday

Sometimes the obvious solution to a problem never actually occurs to you, like when I went to Greece for a conference and discovered during my seven hour layover in Athens that my digital camera wouldn't work.  I soldiered on and catalogued my trip via camera phone and later when someone asked why I didn't just buy a disposable camera I felt a bit stupid because it never occurred to me.  So I present Athens, by camera phone.

The Erechtheum

 

 

The Parthenon

More Parthenon

More Erechtheum

The Acropolis looks lovely - I think the low resolution adds a certain romantic air to the pictures.

View up the hillside.

A theatre

The Odeum of Herodes

Anyway. low resolution aside, it was a lovely way to spend a layover and as I headed back to the airport it started pouring, so I just missed the rain.

And then I went here.  You know, for work.