Call Me Mellow

The weekend was a weekend. Friday night I actually went out (it's really hard for me to get motivated to leave my house when it's midnight dark at 5:00 p.m. and FREEZING BUTT COLD) and met Martha for the movie. If you have not seen Capote, I highly recommend it. Philip Seymour Hoffman was unbelievable! If I hadn't known better I would have thought it was really Truman. I wonder if it's easier to play a live person who has such obvious mannerisms.

We about froze to death walking from the parking to the movie theatre. I escaped a major bullet. I was completely brain dead (comes from driving in rush hour traffic since I never do it) and forgot to feed the meter. DUH! We had a glass of wine before the movie, so I had time to run back to the meter and feed my few quarters into it. Whew!

Saturday was knitting day. I finished an order for two scarves, started a third which I finished yesterday. And then yesterday was Cookie Day.

I don't think I've ever expressed here how much I hate and despise baking cookies. Normally, I'm able to avoid the whole process as I live alone. But once a year I get shanghaied into helping to make Christmas cookies. If it were up to me, there'd be no cookies and everybody would thank me because that would mean fewer additional pounds for the family. But it's not up to me, for some reason. The OS took it upon herself oh so many years ago to rescue Mom from Christmas cookies as a step toward her martyrdom (sister's, not Mom's – although Mom has her own martyrdom happening). Anyway, a number of years back OS got annoyed with the Christmas cookie process and got snotty about nobody helping her. I was living in SF, so I was able to avoid it for a few years, but when I moved back, that was it. There is no option. I have to be there or I'll never hear the end of it from OS. This year I didn't even get included on the date discussion. It was "Oh, by the way, we're making cookies at OS's on Sunday." I almost had had plans for that day and boy was I ticked they hadn't worked out. ;-)

I really needed yesterday for knitting, but instead I was at OS's playing with a flour-butter-sugar-flavoring mixture and didn't get home until 10:00 p.m. The last cookies to be baked were the peanut butter blossoms. Niece and Boyfriend were in charge of rolling them into balls while Mom was in charge of rolling them in sugar. Mom proved herself completely incompetent of making balls. By the time she got done with them they were caked in sugar (nasty) and in every shape except round. She then got all offended when I shook the extra sugar off of them and put them back into ball shape before I put them on the cookie sheet. I swear the older she gets, the more childlike she gets.

I burned myself twice – which isn't too bad. OS has those damn stone baking pans from Pampered Chef and I hate those damn things. They feel like fingernails on a chalkboard to me and they're heavy and awkward and they get fucking hot and stay fucking hot! And then the cookies end up with a slightly more browned bottom than you really want.

Oh well, it might be the last year, because OS was bitching about how she's not doing it anymore. And I can guarandamntee that I won't be volunteering to do it.

Okay, I'm done bitching. ;-)

I told OB (BAB) that I would be terribly thrilled to babysit the Terror Children tonight so that they have time to get some Christmas shopping done, so that's where I'll be heading once I leave work today. I just wish OB and SIL weren't Born Agains and had already told their small children that there's no such thing as Santa Claus, because I would so be using him against them to make them behave themselves. ;-) Hmmm, maybe I'll take my Christmas DVDs (which I watched on Saturday as I had no Netflix movies) with me and make them sit and watch shows about Santa Claus. I need serious knitting time tonight!

And Patsy Darling asked about the purple mashed potatoes from Friday's post about my cousin. Last year on Thanksgiving, my cousin and my niece thought they needed to brighten things up and wanted to put food coloring in to the mashed potatoes. I was very much opposed to the idea as we had purple potatoes one year for Easter when living in SF and they were most unappetising. I lost out and Cousin and Niece put red and blue food dye into the middle of the mashed potatoes and walked away and waited for whomever to mix them up once more (it was bound to happen in our family) to discover the purpleness. How many people can say they had purple mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner? No, it didn't affect the flavor of the potatoes, but the purple was a tad disconcerting.