It's drizzling right now, and that's expected to last for the next day or so. Good day to make that hot chocolate recipe I'd planned for a couple of days ago.
And maybe something else: I picked up a copy of Cooks Illustrated magazine this morning, as it was entirely about Christmas cooking. I don't come from a background where families put out lavish or varied displays of Christmas cookies -- usually, its cookies freshly decanted from a plastic bag of Stella D'oro or the like -- but I've always liked the idea. I can make about three different kinds, four if you count biscotti (though never as good as the chewy kind made by a small company in Maine that has, alas, gone out of business) and I'm always a sucker for anything that promises to show me how to make something new. I think that in a way I'm always trying to make something that evokes the feeling of the soft round chocolate cake - like pastry that I got as a surprise from a local baker when I was about eight -- it was so good that I remember it even now. So, when I saw that the magazine promised to show me how to make really good butter cookies, not to mention, a chocolate mousse cake, well, I was hooked.
Sometimes I wonder why baking is so satisfying. I think it's because its all under your control (well, pretty much), and when you're done, you're done; there is a clear end point. And its part of you on that tray -- not a big part, sure, but something that you obviously liked enough to make. I always feel a little bad for people who bring home-baked cookies to events and at the end of the day see their offerings mostly untouched. I usually take a couple, because I know it'd bother me.
Rocky time sleeping last night; my wife was on a conference call from 11PM on, and I got woken up three times by the phone ringing, even with the two doors closed between the bedroom and the library. I finally got to a sound sleep around 3 -- and got woken up by people from my job to fix a problem that they'd known about two weeks ago but never got around to fixing. But this morning, they were up to check out a product upgrade, and suddenly it was a Big Deal that had to be fixed immediately.
I finally finished Redemption Ark, by Alastar Reynolds. I really enjoyed it, though I did find that if I stepped away from it for a while, I had to back track several pages to get back into the flow of the story. Still, I usually prefer that to a story where the print in big and the concepts are small. I'm not saying I like reading heavy duty novels -- hey, this is for amusement! -- just that there are times where a story with some meat on it is much appreciated. It turned out that RA was the third of a trilogy-plus-one (no idea what you would call that). I may go find the first two and read them -- but right now I want to read the Queen's Dragon series (which is lighter than RA, though not as light as, say, the Star Trek novels I so enjoy) and get back to Team of Rivals. Talk about having to backtrack: on that book, I may have to start again from scratch!
Lots of articles about politics in todays papers. I don't plan on becoming a student of politics, or any of that, but I do want to read them carefully -- weeding out the persiflage (boy, how often do I get to use that word?) for the substantive stuff that will illuminate what went wrong for the Republicans. Two interesting ideas and one bizarre one that I've come across -- first, that the Republicans planned on energizing their base, targeting them with issues that mattered locally, and found to their dismay that what most people (not all, but many) cared about were the national issues, and second, that the swing votes mattered a lot more this election than before, and many of them went Democratic. The bizarre one: perhaps Rove wanted to lose, to give the Republicans a breather, give the Democrats a chance to screw up. I don't believe that, but I guess in the world of politics anything is possible. I like what I've heard Pelosi say so far, especially about not disenfrancising the Republicans. I hope that they can follow through with that.
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