Lovelihood

The last of the jar cakes. We'd kept a handful of this year's batch of cranberry cakes (baked neatly into leeeetle jars), and have been picking them off one by one. These things are supposed to keep up to a year. I don't ever intend to test the upper limit of their shelf stability.

It started before Halloween that the office became a staging area for holiday decorations. Then Christmas and all the fabric scraps strewn about from holiday sewing. Then we got a couch and were swept up in a frenzy of new furniture aquisitions and a fresh round of unpacking and home-decorating, the home-base being, again, the office. I finally cleared away all the clutter today, enough that I was actually able to vacuum. And I was proud enough of this accomplishment that a picture felt in order. Bear decided to intrude. Will they ever be an age and size that their hands cease to amaze me?

Normally, when setting The Boy up with paints, I let him go at it with packing paper, uncrumpled after weeks, months, protecting glassware from shattering, and now stacked in the craft closet. Today, I had a desk drawer unruly with unfiled bills from the last six months. Next step, I'm told, is to fold the sheets into paper aircraft. I might have to cancel paperless billing if we keep this up.

The time, when I finally arrived home after a very long day at work. As relayed by the old beheamoth of an analog clock, really the only one left in our home. All other timepieces double as phones or computers or heavy appliances. This one was picked up during our first joint Ikea raid, a dozen years ago, when we filled up a truck with durable-enough scandinavian goodness and hauled it halfway across the country to inaugurate our shacking-up-together-ness. Still keeps great time.

This ghost of Halloween past was painted at pre-school and brought home to be displayed on the windowsill above our kitchen sink. It sits there still because, well, it hasn't molded yet. Still hard as ever. It reminds me of the lemon that's still sitting in a box in the basement somewhere, which, instead of rotting sensibly like anything else left to idle in a Seattle kitchen, chose to petrify itself into a stiffly fragrant rock.

As close as we get to comfort food around here. Take cooked, unseasoned ramen, stir fry with okra and pan-fried tofu (extra firm, please). Toss with soy sauce and hoisin. Don't forget, when cutting up the tofu, to set some aside, before cooking, for children to swipe off the cutting board as a pre-dinner snack. What? Don't care for okra? No worries. Bear will scarf down any you leave behind in your bowl.

The Boy, amongst his considerable loot, received a pirate ship kit for Christmas, to be assembled and painted and given a place of honor on the mantle. It also came with a cardboard eye patch which we dutifully cut from the box and strung with elastic. The Boy played the part well, "argggg"-ing in response to every query for a weekend. Now it's time to make something a little more permanent, so freezer paper was cut to make a stencil and ironed on to some fabric. The Boy did the honors with some craft paint.