Friday, December 22, 2006

Triumph!!

It has been a very Christmas-y/Chanukah-y week! Last Saturday we had our Cookie Party, a soon-to-be annual festivity during which many people show up at your house with plates of cookies, and you eat lots of them, get a massive sugar high, and attempt to send everyone home with a mix of what everyone else brought. Except that you are still left with 900 cookies. Not that this is a PROBLEM, mind you, it's just a test of the will. I have been giving away lots of them, but yes, I have also been eating lots of them.

In honor of Chanukah, we also made latkes for the first time, and they were not only fun to make but DELICIOUS. We used traditional latke and sweet-potato-and-parsnip latke recipes from the December 2006 issue of Sunset magazine, which worked really well. We are not Jewish, although I have huge respect for a religion whose major holidays all go along the lines of they-tried-to-kill-us-again-they-failed-let's-eat! We continued the eating on Sunday evening at Frank and Mark's annual Chanukah party. They had a giant cooler FULL of potatoes and a latke-making assembly line which was very impressive, but I have to say (at risk of sounding like a Goyish traitor) that
I think ours were better.

Wednesday night we opened presies with Spinnity and Bill, and I received some wonderful knitting-related gifts from them! From the list below I received the blocking board and blocking wires, and from Mom Wiz I received a wonderful book about how to teach children to knit, which will definitely come in handy if I attempt a repeat of this fall's knitting class.

Last night we exchanged gifts with my BF and her daughter Princess M, and triumph! The Christmas sweater fits and looks adorable.


My BF gave me some knitting goodies, including a gift certificate for CommuKnity in San Jose and a book from my list, Knitting Nature. The poor DH! It turns out he had bought me the same book. It's a very DH sort of book, since it combines scientific principles from nature (fractals, spirals, etc.) with knitting. It's stunning to look at and everything looks quite challenging and interesting to knit.

She also gave me the 10th Anniversary DVD collection of the BBC Pride & Prejudice mini-series, which I have on video and watch constantly, plus a hilarious t-shirt that says "I heart Mr. Darcy." My close friends know that I have a Bridget Jones-esque obsession with Colin Firth and his dashingly understated sexiness.


Tonight we are exchanging gifts with my parents, and then we're off to Wisconsin for five days of holidaying with the DH's family.

The biggest and best gift of all is the gift the DH and I gave ourselves -- our new Toyota Prius! We got her on Sunday. We have named her Priya, and she's so much fun to drive. And the best part is that she will save us gas money AND help save the environment. Happy Solstice to Mother Earth!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The cookie party was a ton of fun! Princess M's sweater turned out darling - your colorwork is so neatly done!

alimum said...

Oh my gosh, you got a car! But really, you should have insisted on having a gigantic bow for the photograph (just because those bows always look so odd in the commercials, one never actually sees them in real life).

I remember I was once in a show and we were playing some game where we named British heart throbs and I shouted out "Colin Firth" and everyone else was like "Who's Colin Firth?" And talking about Pride and Prejudice just made me look like more of a geek in their eyes.

I tagged you for the six weird things meme.

spinnity said...

Oh where oh where has the wizknitter gone.. oh where oh where can she be?

Hope knitting and life are going swimmingly. Would love to see the rest of the Xmas knitting photos if there are some of the throw, the CNITU prezzies, anything else on the heap.