But just look at the eyes on this kid:
The cuteness…
And because I know you are all wondering:
Yes, he’s since gotten a haircut.
Yes, I eventually cleaned up his nose.
and
Yes, I realize that he is wearing one ugly shirt.
(Also, yes, I’m very happy with the new camera.)
I’ve opened a bakery.
Friday was Christmas around the world day at school, and we were asked to send a food from Holland. I’m not Dutch. I found this apple cake, or should I say appelgebak, recipe online and plunged straight ahead. Although there was no picture with the recipe, my neighbor tells me it looks just like something you’d find in a European bakery. If it can be identified as coming from the proper continent, I feel my work is done. That other thing there is Irish soda bread, with some sprinkles on it to make it look, ahem, pretty.
The cookies were made for Marty’s Christmas party, and then rejected because they were home made. His teachers told me that I could carry the plate around the party and offer them to the other parents and kids, but they couldn’t go on the table. I briefly considered going around and saying “Hi, I’m typhoid Mary, would you like some of my poison cookies?” but I decided to just quietly put them back in the car and recycle them at our party that was held on Sunday.
The cupcakes were for the school choir bake sale, where apparently suspect home made food was allowed.
This:
Plus this:
was bad enough. But as part of the Sudoku game, there is another little game called Pair Match:
What you do is draw a line between each pair of matching numbers, but none of the lines between the pairs can intersect the lines between other pairs, like this:
You have 30 seconds to finish it, and as soon as you’re done, a new one pops up. The DS keeps track of how many you do in a row, and compares it to your all time “record.” The doofus guy on the top screen (whose purpose I’m not quite sure of, except that he is better than the half-shirted girlie doofus who is the other choice) looks very humdrum if you don’t break the record every time you play.
When the game is that quick, it’s easy (for me anyway) to end up spending a half hour playing hundreds of little games (just one more then I’ll quit, well maybe one more, well I can’t quit until I lose a game, well I lost a game but I’ll just play one more quick game and then I’ll quit, etc. etc. etc.). Somewhere in my mind I know I’ve got a million things to do, but somewhere else in my mind I guess I’m just desperate to cheer up the doofus.
Guess what else:
New camera.
Old camera. I guess given how beat up it is, I shouldn’t be complaining about the quality of pictures that the old one puts out. It still has its moments, but as discussed ad nauseum, we don’t know how many moments it has left. Hopefully some day soon I will use one or both of the cameras to take pictures of something other than the other electronic stuff in my house.
Yeah, so the reindeer cookies turned out quite well in theory, and I managed to transport them to the school without dropping the container and breaking them all (I had a flashback last night to the one Christmas when I did drop an entire container of carefully cut out sugar cookies. I pulverized them, every one). Unfortunately, Lauren reports that the head and legs broke off from hers, and pretty much all the other kids’. Good thing they’re all so gifted or they might have had a crying fest.
But is it all my fault? Let’s look again at the cookie cutters:
and let’s look again at the box they came in:
Is it just me, or is there absolutely no correlation between the two? The necks on the cookies I made were so long they were rather reminiscent of giraffes. The necks of the reindeer on the box? Oh, I see, they don’t have any necks. And what about the lopsided leg cookies with one wide side and one dainty little skinny side? The legs of the reindeer on the box? Oh, yes, look at that, wide, sturdy, equal-sized legs that one might expect on a reindeer that can fly around the whole world in one night.
I don’t want to put forth any ridiculous conspiracy theories, but I do think that it’s interesting that the cutters were made in China, a place where Christmas and other religious observances are not exactly all the rage. Perhaps they are trying to sabotage our way of life by ruining our Christmas cookies? Just a thought.
However, I am most annoyed with Williams-Sonoma. Perhaps sirs, you should spend a little less time putting out billions of catalogs every Christmas and a little more time making sure the things that you are selling will not sabotage my way of life by ruining my Christmas cookies.
25 heads…
and 0 brains?
A: My kitchen.
(Look at that copy of A Christmas Carol under there. Is there any point in trying to figure out how it ended up on the washing machine under a tray of reindeer parts?)
So a few weeks ago our teeny tiny Lauren was snatched from the tedium of her first grade classroom and placed into the “gifted” program.* Tomorrow they are having a party to wrap up (heh) their December unit which included learning three Christmas carols in sign language and then performing them at nursing homes, making ornaments and then using them to decorate a tree in the town square, and apparently learning all about reindeer. A little note that came home with Lauren asked if a parent would bake 24 reindeer sugar cookies for the kiddies to decorate at the party.
I like to bake, I have a killer sugar cookie recipe, and I’m always on the look out for ways to volunteer without actually having to see other peoples’ kids. So I volunteered. Erin pointed out that reindeer are the hardest cookies to make, because their little legs break so easily. She is right, but I hadn’t thought of that, I was only thinking of ways to make them even harder to make.
So I mentioned these cookie cutters to Lauren’s teacher:
and offered to bring the 3D version for the kiddies to decorate. That of course, was before I’d ever actually made them. The reindeer ones really don’t work that well. And they use lots of cookie dough. And I meant to make them this morning, but we had an ice storm and school opened two hours late and blah, blah, blah at 9:00 pm tonight, I finally started rolling out the dough. When I was finished at 10:00 pm, I was out of dough and still 9 pairs of legs short.
Yes, I suppose I should be making more cookie dough now rather than sitting here complaining about it, but as I said before, I’m not so much with the thinking today.
Is there any chance that 24 happy gifted children will have one of these sitting in front of them tomorrow?
Is there any chance that 24 cranky gifted children won’t have some of these sitting in front of them tomorrow?
I hope the “gifted” squad doesn’t come and remove Lauren from my influence.
* And the test scores confirm that the “Lauren stare,” the look that for six long years has made young and old feel a bit uneasy and stupid, has a rock-solid foundation. She is in fact, smarter than all of us.
(I’m not really sure when I’ll get to fixing the header, but perhaps people who read this post will understand why…)
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