Precor Elliptical, 45', resistance 12/20, incline 20/20, total strides 5650: average 125+, and I didn't feel it at all. Wasn't my goal some times ago 6000 strides in 45'?
After we returned from the museum on Thursday I made gingerbread. I knew enough to make the top and bottom the same size and I really tried to make the walls the same height but unsuccessfully, so I joined some of the walls to the roof with marshmallows. Also it didn't occur to me to leave a brim, so my gingerbread drum was a slice of column. Drums don't have brims, but I've never met a drum that bore any resemblance to what I created. It was, as I anticipated it, a reason for me to play with frosting, and as such I should have gone prospecting for decorations earlier and farther afield than Christmas Eve at the corner store, and however much a drum is decorated isn't the top usually empty, for drumming? Not mine. It didn't occur to me until after I had glued (with confectioner's sugar and water) a few M&Ms to the top that I shouldn't have. And the 7-11 didn't have regular marshmallows (as I knew from an excursion that was supposed to have resulted in s'mores, since we had an outdoor fire, instead of ice cream) but only wee ones for cocoa, so I crammed about three onto the ends of unmatched candy canes (the only two I had) and used more glue.
It was a sight. A damn funny one, I thought, and I expected it would still eat well, but its present-ness was in its humor value. Except that its recipient is two, when a drum is a drum and candy is candy; and his parents are polite; and it did eat well. Well, now I know what I did wrong. Experience won't give me taste but perhaps it imbued me with construction guidelines. RDC said it looked like Stonehenge with a roof.
When I talked to Charenton, Mémé thanked me for the measuring spoons (making cookies there last month, I had use of a tablespoon and a half-teaspoon measure, and I am not so skilled a cook that I easily got by without the regular assortment) and the earrings. Also during that visit, she complimented my tanzanite (periwinkle blue) studs and I told her how they had come to be, with RDC finding them when one of the amethyst studs was (temporarily) lost. She told me then of having lost a hummingbird earring, and I asked if it was a flat gold hummingbird touching a flat gold dime-sized disk at three points of beak, wing, and tail, because her daughter had given me such a pair many years ago and I had also lost one of mine. Gold's not my thing and I was thinking to give her the other. But she said no, these were three-dimensional birds. Today I told her that when I shopped for stocking materials and came across the wee hummingbirds, I decided to make her a new pair. (I already had periwinkle seed beads; it's a favorite color of both of ours). "You made them?" she asked, now appreciating the gift more. I was glad she liked them and also a little stoked she hadn't immediately seen they were hand-made.
The stockings went over well, I am happy to report: Siblet did not have a stocking yet and the ones they were going to use were flimsy and unpersonalized. Nisou liked the beading, colors, and fabric. Whew. The fish puzzle is beautiful and the circus animal ornaments perfect. I liked them because they looked handmade and because one of them is a giraffe, like Nanabush. The books--The First Starry Night and In the Garden with Van Gogh--Mémé and I duplicated. Ha! We have the same excellent taste. So they might go on to one of Nisou's French god-children. (She has four altogether: everyone wants her in their family.)
I am wearing a t-shirt from the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, even though I am not much of a t-shirt wearer anymore: Nisou gave it to me, and it has Eric Carle's catepillar and Leo Lionni's mice and Maurice Sendak's wild things on it. Also an M whose picture-book source I do not recognize.
My mother's husband liked his share of a llama, except from now I think I am going to give six months of education to a child in someone's name instead of livestock. Except maybe a goat. I really want to give someone a goat. My notstepmother loved her turtle cookie-cutter and ornaments and chocolate-covered blueberries and I hope she likes having read Falling Angels as much as she likes anticipating reading it. My father is looking forward to True History of the Kelly Gang and probably has already played a round of gold in his new shirt on his new tees. And my mother seems to like her slate-teal fleece sweater. So that's all good.
When my sister and I talked the other day, she asked if I had listened to the message she left at my cell number. "I lost my phone," I told her. In it, she had told me about Kitty's out-of-body experiences with her new catnip toy and other escapades from their early Christmas. The one escapade that bears repeating is An Improvement on our mother's part. I made my sister a construction paper house to contain a token contribution toward a down payment on an actual house, and when she lifted the roof and withdrew the currency, our mother asked, "Oo, how much did she give you?" CLH just didn't answer, so that was fine, but the Improvement is that the next day, our mother apologized, uttering the actual words "I'm sorry, I was wrong" for what my sister reckons was the second or possibly third time in her own life. CLH supposes that BJWL's husband gave her a ration of shit, CLH's phrase, for the crass question. CLH tried to communicate appreciation for our mother's accepting her own responsiblity without possible implication that appreciation meant such inquiries are permissible. When CLH and I unwrapped stockings this morning over the phone, she said something that cracked me right the hell up: "why is there a phone in here?" "I found my phone," I told RDC. CLH and I appreciated our own and the other's stupidity: mine for shipping my own phone two thousand miles away and hers for not making the connection between unpacking such a device last weekend and my announcing two days ago I had lost one.
My notstepmother gave me a cookie-dough scooper, sort of like a melon baller but with a half-circle scraper thingie to knock the dough out. That will help me make more uniform cookies. My sister gave me a silicon sheet for over a cookie sheet. This season I converted myself to parchment paper: I could prepare all the batter at once, instead of having to wait for a cookie sheet to cool to use it again and not waiting and melting the dough before baking it, and then slide a prepared paper onto a cooled sheet as a rack opened. Genius, I say. Also the cookies were popular at the party, which made me happy. My mother gave me elderberry jelly, which makes me terrifically happy. You can never buy it anywhere and I have got to make sure she records all her secret berry patches more permanently than only on her mental treasure map. Also she dug out yet another of Granny's photograph albums, this one full of treasures. I really want one of Gram Lawrence on a moped (these exist from a mother-daughter jaunt to Cape Cod, I think), and one of my father tilting a beer bottle into the mouth of his diapered younger daughter so that when people say "you've really never drunk a beer?" I can show them that okay, yes I have done, but not for decades.
RDC made me a stand for the emu egg he brought me from Australia. On its face is etched a cockatoo-like bird, and before he flew home from Sydney he said I would either get the present he intended or many itsy-bitsy ones. The one unshattered present he intended rested on its side on a pallet of bubble wrap for months until yesterday. He bought a gnarled root of manzanita wood from the wood-working store, ground all the dirt out of it, carved out a more egg-shaped curve than the natural one that inspired its use, and sliced off the bottom into a flat surface. It is lovely, and now lives atop the bookcase.
I didn't make him anything. I beaded his name onto his stocking, which he already knew, and fed the brilliant suggestion of a cookbook holder to my mother for my sister to steal. It was brilliant because I knew he would like it but was unlikely to know such a thing exists. Otherwise I gave him books: five. It is the first year he has received more books than I. Except that one book, and another from his mother, are really presents for me, along with cookware: Roasting: A Simple Art and The Breadbaker's Apprentice.
Oh, that's why I've had Kate Bush's "Houdini" in my head: the cadence of the entry title. "With a kiss/ I'd pass the key/ And feel your tongue/ Teasing and receiving."
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala won the Booker for this. I like the parallels between the two courses of action 50 years apart, and what it had to say about the British in India 25 years before and after its independence, but I confess I know so little about India--Midnight's Children, two Rumer Goddens, and Just So Stories are about my limit--that I must miss oodles of meaning.