Nibble Nibble, Part III: Housing Collapse

So this is the finished house, pristine, gracing the dining table for exactly a couple of hours. Within minutes of its completion, the makers began to withdraw their profits, as evidenced by the erosion of the far front corner of the roof, broken ridgepole and missing gumdrops.

After several days, this is the sorry condition of the gingerbread house. Everyone has been pilfering edges, corners, decorations, and last night Daughter and Friend abandoned all pretense of decorum and broke it apart into a pile of cookie pieces. The pieces now live in the cookie jar from the gift basket I won in the library's raffle, but I don't expect them to last much longer..

As we continue to nibble, we remember the fun we had baking and building the little house, and the glow of Christmas cheer warms us all anew. I know I would cheerfully do it all again next year!

(The recipe I use was originally published in the Honolulu Advertiser on December 17, 1970, page G1. The featured baker was Christl Chun, of Manoa.)

Christmas 2008

Daughter and I were tired from having gone to Midnight Mass last night, so we slept in. First time we ever did that on Christmas morning! Husband got the turkey in the oven right after breakfast just before Son showed up at the door - much earlier than expected - bearing gifts. This business of all-adult Christmases is still very new for us.

Although not an entirely techie Christmas, we accumulated a variety of electronic toys: Son's iPhone he bought late yesterday afternoon; the digital picture frame he gave me; the bluetooth headset I gave him. I have already been playing with my Dell Mini 9 for a week. Husband received Spore, and has already created his planet and cellular being, which has evolved into a legless ping-pong ball-like creature with a long snake-like tail, pincer jaws and a single eye in the middle of its back. Daughter created a couple of "Celtic Christmas" CDs from iTunes downloads, but we haven't been able to enjoy them yet, because the CD player has failed. Maybe we can take advantage of the post-Christmas sales to pick up a newer model.

And the food! This year, there was definitely too much. To be fair, we were expecting guests for dinner, but that didn't work out, so we have extra turkey, piles of stuffing, and several baked goods we never even touched: apple pie, cranberry squares, and also cranberry bread.

All-in-all, it was a good Christmas: much more relaxed than some, and the rainy morning made being indoors with a warm cuppa cider very cozy. We called Husband's family in Kentucky and my family in Hawaii.

Nibble, Nibble, Part II

This is the finished gingerbread house. They couldn't wait, so the little mousekins began nibbling right away on the edges of the roof. It was fun to watch them get all creative with Skittle paving stones, gumdrop "trees", and gummmi bears in the back yard.

It rained all day today. I went to Curves, then spent the rest of the day baking cranberry bread and cranberry bars, and downloading Christmas music from iTunes. Daughter is supposed to bake date bars and an apple pie sometime between now and bed time. If she does it, that will be a good trick, because the same span of time is assigned to dinner, watching "Christmas Carol" with George C. Scott, and going to Midnight Mass. Ah, how the energy and optimism of youth is wasted on the young!

Connections

It's a good thing Christmas comes once a year! Writing cards, sending photos, making phone calls - all re-connect people who really care, but may be separated by distance or busyness. This "touching bases" is not limited to family, but also re-connects friends.

For example, Wayne and Shirley were our neighbors in the apartment building we lived in when we first got married. They were there when Pat was born, and have sent us cards and photos of their son every year since, including this one.

Louise and I met in the mid-70s when we both worked for Dr. Wong, and we have been friends ever since. Although she now lives in a different state, I have participated vicariously in her travels and adventures, and enjoy her holiday newsletters. This year's note said, "Nothing interesting happened this year," which, knowing Louise, may not be strictly true.

Diana and I were in the same summer study abroad group in 1969, and likewise have been corresponding annually ever since. We've "seen" our children grow up and move out, shared stories about caring for spouses and parents.

In the family, I'm embarrassed to say I have cousins within driving distance that we only rarely visit or call. However, their annual Christmas newsletter lets us catch up not only with them, but also with their extended family.

In recent years, the Internet has also provided a vehicle for staying connected. Facebook is an easy way to make news and photos available for friends and family to see. My Jamaica cousins are on Facebook, as are the daughters of a cousin in Texas from my dad's side of the family. Twitter makes it easy to update my Facebook status from any computer or by sending a text message from my cell phone. And Flickr and other photo-sharing sites like KodakGallery make it so easy to share photos all year round, not just the canned school photos that we used to enclose in Christmas cards. (JOKE!)

I guess it's the same social conscience that brings families back to church at Christmas and Easter. It's been a while, but we're planning to attend Midnight Mass at St. Anthony's this year for the first time in 23 years.

Nibble Nibble Mousekin

L and J decided to bake a gingerbread house this evening after dinner. Baking involves boiling honey and butter and sugar and letting it cool before adding the flour and spices, rolling out the three sheets, and baking the gingerbread. So they got tired after doing most of the work, and Mom actually did the baking. The shapes are now cut, and we'll assemble it in the morning.

Tuppence a Bag

In the film, "Mary Poppins", there's a song, "Feed the Birds." Passers-by at the cathedral of St. Paul's are invited to buy bags of crumbs to feed the pigeons. (Remember when pigeons were not pests?)

In our apartment complex, there's a woman who feeds the feral cats. She's out of town for a few days, and L is delegated to do it tonight and tomorrow. Our manager brought by the supplies: a warehouse-sized bag of take-out styrofoam trays, a 25# bag of kibbles, a grocery bag full of canned food. Oh, and a bag of plastic spoons. The instructions: cut four trays in half at the hinge, fill two with kibbles, and two with canned food mixed with the kibbles. So, after the mixing and pouring, L and her friend have carted the trays down to the park.

Remember when feral cats were not pests?

It's so CUTE!

My new Dell Mini 9 came today. It's so tiny, it's smaller than a sheet of typing paper. But it has a built-in 1.3 megapixel camera, microphone and speakers. It comes with Linux Ubuntu, Firefox and Open Office. And lots of games, including my favorites: Free Cell and Sudoku! It weighs almost nothing and will fit in my purse. The keyboard is small, too, but it doesn't take long to adjust. My biggest challenge is learning to use the Ubuntu operating system. It's shiny white and I love it!

Misty Moisty Morning

A and I went for a walk up on the levee late-morning and found a few more interesting things to photograph. Lately, it has been very foggy, although this morning the fog was mostly higher. There is a difference between "fog" and "tule fog". Tule fog rises from the ground and hides everything: trees, traffic lights, street lights, tail-lights, and rivers. Regular fog masquerades as "overcast". Thursday night, M and I went to the Celtic Thunder concert. On arrival, all was good. On exit, we couldn't even see the parking lot from the arena doors.

Because the fog layer is so thick, the daytime highs are in the mid-40s - at 2 p.m. today it was 43 degrees! Yesterday, the high was 46. The lows are in the upper 30s. It's cold for this time of year! To take the chill off, L and I plan to bake cookies after dinner tonight and have them for dessert with hot chocolate. (These are the cookies that were in the gift basket I won in the raffle at our staff's "Winter Wowzer" meeting/party on Friday. As advertised, they are "scandalously good!") I opened the cookie jar and shared it with the staff, so didn't bring even one cookie home!

Prize Cookies

Wow! I won a gift basket in the raffle this morning, and the sample cookies are my new all-time favorite! Mmmm ... crispy salted oatmeal white chocolate cookies! As you can see from the half-empty cookie jar, I've been at 'em already. The Fair Oaks Library staff also included a comb-bound cookbook with staff-tested cookie recipes, including the one for these cookies, a cookie-sheet, spatula, oven mitts, measuring cups, and ingredients for the next generation of cookies: turbinado sugar, sea salt, white and dark chocolate chips, raisins, dried cherries, etc.

This morning, the library held its annual all-staff meeting, formerly known as the "cookie meeting" because of the cookie exchange that took place every year. Additionally, staff would donate several dozens of items for a raffle, which would go on forever. To shorten the meeting, for the last few years, the cookies and raffle have been supplanted by gift baskets and a silent auction, each branch preparing a themed basket. All proceeds go to support a charity, and this year's chosen charity is WEAVE.