Lovelihood

Still keeping to that tight deadline of Christmas wrangling, I carved a couple blocks the other day. Can't say I love how these things smell, but I do love doing it.

So what if I take this shot every year? What's the point of stringing up your tree with candy colored lights if you don't milk it for all its bokeh glory?

When making up a pear tart, it's best to just go ahead and cut out some leaves from the scraps and lay those suckers over the rest of the thing.

I'm deep in Christmas-makings here, prototyping and lots of cutting. Here, a glimpse of this year's cards, which may go out on time this year.

There was a time when I had a problem with magazines. Like I had dozens of subscriptions, more issues coming in weekly than I could possibly keep up with. I've been subscription free, here for a few years now, fearful that if I let one through, the floodgates will burst open and I'll be the crazy hoarder lady on some reality tv scourge. I pick up the occasional issue at the newsstand, though, and I bought what turned out to be my new favorite magazine last week for the airplane ride. It's so good that, selling him on the quarterly aspect of it, I believe I've garnered The Mr.'s approval to step back into the magazine game. Anyway, in it, there was a piece on one man's obsessive search for a fantastically sweet glabrous (go on, look it up) apricot, with skin so smooth as to seem translucent. That's what these cranberries, having spent a day steeped in syrup, look like, so candy-like I thought that giving them a castor sugar tumble might just be overkill.

I started the holiday prep today by blanching some pretty dull looking cranberries in a just-off-the-burner simple syrup. Now they look like Christmas.

The week before Thanksgiving, The Mr. took time off of work to take in IMAX movies and jaunt around science museums and feed money into machines that would extrude plastic into a train shaped mold or shoot and develop a strip of poorly exposed poses.