Happy New Year!

It is a cold and windy New Year's Day, more quiet than it has been around here for a long, long time. It's been great having the family all together again (see left), and my parents came to visit for a few days between Christmas and New Year's Eve. Now that the holidays are over, I'm energized and itching to return to a story I began working on before Christmas.






Some pictures to give you an idea of what's been going on these past two weeks:

Remember my recent interest in mathematical crocheting? This was the result; a moebius scarf I made for Caitlin. I thought it turned out pretty well. There are two ways of going about making a moebius scarf: there is the cheater's way, in which you crochet the whole scarf, joining the ends with a twist when you're finished. Or there is the more interesting way, in which you create a twist after finishing the first row by joining the bottom of that row to the top of the second.

The girls tell me I'm gaining a reputation for giving geeky presents, starting with the time I gave them cane toad purses for Valentine's Day one year. Alison's geeky Christmas present this year was a plush Streptococcus pneumonia (www.giantmicrobes.com). Eli did not get a geeky present. He is geeky enough all by himself.


The kids and I had fun baking. We made gingerbread cookies; Eli made a version of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulu, accompanied by a terror-striken angel, one-armed teddy bear, and dismayed snowman:



Caitlin and I made rugelach, a delicious Jewish cookie made by wrapping a cream cheese dough around a mixture of dried fruit, nuts, and levkar or jam. I must say, I think that for a goy I make a pretty mean rugelach, thanks to Lauren Groveman's recipe in Baking with Julia. No pictures, unfortunately. And then Alison and I made croissants (also using a recipe from Baking with Julia), which were amazingly delicious and well worth the effort, although I did manage to burn out the motor on my Kitchen Aid mixer kneading the dough, which is very hard and not at all easy to work with at first. But look!

OK, now I need to go to the gym. I think you understand why. Wishing everyone a joyful, productive new year!

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Now playing: Girlyman - St Peter's Bones
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