Lovelihood

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.

The Boy brought home from school a wealth of knowledge of cranberries and their cultivation, and what I took to be a rigid garland of the boggy fruits and Cheerio spacers. I've been told that it is a birdfeeder, so I guess the squirrels will have their shot at it soon.

The Mr. and Bear hijacked a Boy-requested photo-shoot of the newly constructed Lego thing that he didn't have the time to work on while we were in Colorado for Thanksgiving. So, pretty much, nothing's in focus.

I'm not saying that Colorado isn't sometimes a stunning and beautiful place, too stark and grand for capture with a camera phone through the window of the car driving you to the airport. I'm just saying that home is always better.

It was in Boulder that The Mr. And I shared our first home together, a sweet space on the upper floor of a building that seemed to have been a corner shop in quainter times. Every few years we cruise by and point it out to the kids who feign interst for the five seconds they're willing to break eye contact from their iPads and then we move on to a nice stroll on Pearl Street.