heading in for the holidays

School’s over for the season. The house is full of empty boxes and not enough, relatively speaking, wrapped gifts. I’ve made several batches of fudge but gone totally AWOL on actual holiday baking, and I’m astonishingly full of not caring. One of my jars of homemade applesauce (from the batch I think I forgot to put lemon juice into) has gone moldy and now I’m slightly frantic to get the rest of it to other people so they can eat it before it goes bad. We’re having chicken soup for…

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so dinner. much friends.

A couple of girlfriends are back in town for the holidays, so our little Lady Writers Group went out to dinner last night. I’d put on one of my 1950s style dresses (at home, obviously) and was looking at myself dubiously in the mirror when Young Indiana came in and says, “You look BEAUTIFUL, Mommy! Wear that! Wear that!” ♥ ♥ ♥ So I wore that. :) We went into town, and Indy entertained a 9 month old baby girl on the train for the entire trip in, and I…

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holiday prep

Yesterday we went to Dublin to do any shopping that could be done in the real world. I was moderately successful; Ted was not. He was, however, very, very tired after tromping all over hell and breakfast without finding anything. Poor guy. I had some kind of story I was going to tell about the shopping, but I seem to have forgotten it. Unless it was the fact that when I stood to get off the bus, coming home, the bottom fell out of one of the bags I had,…

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Recent Reads: Little House books

I bought the Little House series (the proper edition, illustrated by Garth Williams) for Young Indiana last year for Christmas, thinking that sometime in the next year or so he might be about ready to start having them read to him. A few months ago he got LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE, brought it to me, and said, “Maybe we could read this book! It has a FEW pictures!” I told him we had to start with LITTLE HOUSE IN THE BIG WOODS, but that I would love to read…

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worst. cooking. ever.

I have, in a really stunning run, made two bad batches of fudge in a row and followed it up with pie crust worse than what I made at Thanksgiving, which was, up until then, easily the worst I’d ever made. But that’s okay, because the pie I then made was too sweet, too! Srsly. *dies in a pit* I’ve now gotten all the necessary ingredients to make experimental allergy-safe fudge for my friend’s dairy-and-eggs-allergic son, and since I was in the market anyway I also got enough to make…

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