Holiday Recovery...and Snow!

Well, Christmas wasn't particularly white, but New Year's looks like it will have a light layer of snow. We got about an inch here in southern Vermont, and my parents got about 4 inches up North.

In other news, Ivan and I are committing to getting our financial ducks in order. A new copy of Quicken has been installed on the computer, and all accounts have been entered. This ushers in a new era of fiscal responsibility, we hope: living within our means (we're already doing a decent job of that), paying off the credit card debt, saving for a house and retirement, and so on and so forth. There will be health insurance and steady income this year, too. In other words, life is good.

Now we're off to a low-key New Year's Eve party, where there will be yummy food and plenty of drink. Oh, and fireplaces. Definitely fireplaces.

Why Eggnog is Not Evil

Many think that eggnog is an evil, vile concoction characterized by thickness and high fructose corn syrup. This is not the case. Eggnog, real eggnog, involves farm fresh eggs (laid the day of the festivities), fresh cold milk, some sugar, some vanilla, some orange peel, and copious amounts of rum.

That, dear readers, is what I feasted on last night, at the in-laws' annual cookie exchange at the gallery they own. What is a cookie exchange? Besides being an opportunity to feast on eggnog, it's a party in which you bring 3 dozen home baked cookies of one sort, and go home with 3 dozen home baked cookies of all different sorts. Brilliant!

Holiday Revelry

Like most holiday festivities, my company's office party took lots of preparation and went on far longer than it was supposed to. This meant that most of us spent most of today walking around with a glazed look in our eyes, wondering what it was we had walked into the room to do. However, the gingerbread house I made with fellow employee J. (shown below, in a picture taken by fellow employee M.) was a huge hit.

Making all of this more difficult was the fact that we had rearranged all of the furniture in the open part of our office to make the party possible. That meant that when I walked into work this morning, my desk was facing the wall, my chair had disappeared to an office down the hall, my phone was buried somewhere in my cabinet, and all of my files were in disarray in a drawer. Not to mention the fact that we were on a deadline today (that we pushed to Monday, because we can).

At any rate, I'm now curled up with my computer on my bed, doing a little bit of work, but mostly just enjoying being home and being in my comfy clothes (thank god for thrift store cashmere!). My better half is rattling around in the kitchen, trying to scrounge up something for dinner, and there will likely be a bottle of wine in my very near future. So really, life is good.

The Non-Report

There's really not much to report, hence the significant lack of blogging lately. Ivan and I spent much of our weekend watching his parents' gallery (aka sitting around, listening to music, making art for hours on end). We had a nice dinner with a colleague on Saturday, with a really yummy buckwheat crepe, cheese, and mushroom pie with a side of broccoli rabe.

This inspired me to get back into vegetarian cooking and to start easing meat back out of my diet. So far, so good. Butternut squash risotto last night, bean tacos tonight (with homemade corn tortillas).

That's about all that's happening around here. The snow never really arrived here in any significant way from the Midwest, but it is now seasonably cold. Time for Christmas tree tromping (this involves hiking through the woods, looking for a tree that isn't too terribly deformed, then hauling it back to the ubiquitous Subaru)!