Moot Point

I didn’t really ask for any big gifts this year. I mean, sure, I wanted a stand mixer and a stock pot, but these are not the kinds of gifts built for air travel. However, I didn’t know that my parents were getting my brother a laptop.

My parents got me:
• an iHome (!)
• the ultimate Brenda sweater: grey cashmere, scoopneck, with scalloping
• Veronica Mars DVDs
• a book
• the promise of a cheque to pay for a stock pot
• the always-suprising movie poster calendar
Brother got me:
• Clone High DVDs
Grandparents got me:
• Tommy Hilfiger sweater (because they don’t know I never wear Tommy Hilfiger stuff except my summer bathrobe and that blazer Alex bought and then gave it to me because he realized it was womens’)
• cheque for $50
Dan and Tim got me, respectively:
• a pale blue fleece blanket
• red mixing bowls which are remarkably similar to the red mixing bowls I already own, but can be exchanged for other cookware (updates pending
Alex got me (which I opened a few days ago):
• Dawn Powell book
• Orange bird wallet I liked at Propaganda (trust me it’s awesome)

Things I got for people:

Mom (with brother):
• Running mitts
• Cutesy Santa ornament and snowman
Dad (with brother):
• B.B. King duets CD
• Both Kill Bill movies; they don’t come as a set, but I taped them together
Brother:
• Propaghandi CD (not the new one, which he already bought)*
Alex:
• Taupe/brownish cardigan
Dan and Tim, respectively:
• no idea yet
• one idea, maybe
• both: baked goods!

My family Christmas Eve consisted of a taco dinner that included homemade guacamole (mine) and homemade refried beans (my brother’s), then driving out the south end of our subsection to check out the really gaudy house, which had 14 of these awful inflatable decorations and played music. This was my mom’s idea. My mom’s idea of a good Christmas Eve was to check out a house’s decorations for their ironic value. My heart grew about three sizes. My brother said “I am your son!”

Awesome.

*I got this from a CD store in a mall, and the punk section had Hot Hot Heat in it. In whose world are they remotely punk rock? That dude looks like Canadian Idol who would never have won in a less dorky country Kalan Porter.

So my baking plans have given way to sitting around and drinking lots of orange juice to counteract the large quantities of beer and wine and eggnog I will be consuming this weekend. I know it won’t make me healthy, but I figure if I drink enough Tropicana Homestyle that the festivities won’t actually make me sicker. (I am like one step down from full-on sick. I hope to get angel/pecan bars done tomorrow; most of the stuff from the florentines will keep (except the heavy cream; sigh) so I can always make them after Christmas.

The reason that I’m posting is you know you always hear those stories about how people use those cameras to like, get the info off your bank card and steal your PIN and somehow make fake bank cards and then steal all your money? I’ve always dismissed those as total bull, but it totally happened to a guy I work with. Apparently his card was declined yesterday and it said the card was cancelled and it turned out this guy had been like, making fake deposits and taking out all this money. (He’s going to be okay, he’s covered and will have his money back). For actual real.

In other news, the Jenny Lewis solo album has a cover of “Handle With Care” by the Traveling Wilburys. I loved this song as a small girl. I was a big George Harrison fan.

Okay, I’m embarrassed to admit this because the show has gotten so bad, like “Don’t rob the convenience store to pay for your knee surgery so you can join the pro surfing tour, Johnny! There’s another way!” bad. But. I totally just started crying during The O.C. Chrismukkah special.

I think this is a sign I’m getting sick.

I’m too tired to bake tonight. I have no idea when I’m going to use all these nuts. I guess Rach doesn’t get in until Saturday night, so I can bake during the day. After I do my laundry. Oh man.

I think I’m coming down with something. Cold, lack of sleep and poor nutrition do not a healthy person make. Yesterday I ate: coffee, pizza, mac and cheese, a cookie, and two cups of hot chocolate. So not pretty.

I accidentally bought salted butter at the store today. They should warn people. Also, memo to No Frills: since when was regularly stocking shelves a “frill”? I went to look for any kind of dark chocolate and coconut and they still had none of either.

I’ve looked in two different stores for coconut. This is not a popular ingredient here people! I know it kind of looks like snow, but that’s no excuse. Another thing there is no excuse for is burning my thumb on the hot brownie pan. I am retarded. The white stuff in the middle of the brownies is cream cheese. It’s Nigella’s recipe, but I had to make half again as much to fill my larger pan. It seemed to work out okay, but I didn’t need near as much cream cheese as I thought.

Whipped Shortbread

I don’t really think it relates to regular shortbread, other than in taste. These are so foolproof — it’s baking for people who don’t really bake. Additionally, they’re delicious. No matter what else we make and buy, these are always the first Christmas treats to disappear.

1 cup butter 1/2 cup icing sugar 1 1/2 cups flour (a few glace cherries, cut into quarters)

This is way easier with a stand mixer.

Cream together softened butter and icing sugar. Add the flour (I’d imagine it would be easiest to go gradually, but lord knows I’ve never thought of doing this until after I’d dumped in the whole shebang). Beat for 10 minutes, or if you’re me, until your cheap-o electric hand mixer overheats at the six-minute mark.

Drop by teaspoons onto a cookie sheet, either greased, nonstick, or lined with parchment paper. (The latter works really well. I somehow only discovered parchment paper this year — I don’t know why, I’d seen it used for years including at the restaurant where I worked. In a food preparation capacity. But it never occured to me that I should just buy some.) I find sort of scraping using two spoons produces the best shape.

Top with glace cherry pieces if you wish. (I know glace cherries are creepy and that they must use all kinds of chemicals to make them green and that shade of red, but they both look festive and provide a chewy, sticky counterpoint to the buttery smoothness of the cookies.)

Bake in a 350 F oven for 10-12 minutes. You can tell they’re done when you can see brown around the edges at the bottom.

Let them cool totally before you try them. For some reason, if you eat these hot, they’re kind of cloying and overly buttery, but when they cool, they’re perfection.

Okay, so I was at work all day with my obvious new hair colour and no one said a word. Obviously they hate it.

Or they were distracted by my Bromwell High sweater.

To wit:

I was going to do a picture of me posing like she’s holding the baby, but with The Joy of Cooking, but it was too hard to hold the camera/get the angle right, so you get the unflattering bathroom self-portrait instead. Whatever, I gave you cookies!

But he chafes when people compare him to confessional songwriters like Nick Drake or Elliott Smith, and he uses the name Coldplay almost as a curse. “I think self-expression and catharsis makes bad music,” he said. “There are potholes in people’s perceptions, and you want to steer around some and totally dive into others.”

Carl Wilson interviews Final Fantasy (a.k.a. Owen Pallett) for the NY Times. There wasn’t really a lot of stuff I didn’t know, but then it wasn’t really written for people like who are already fans.

I fell totally in love with him when we saw him open for the Arcade Fire in April. I wound up listening to the album practically nonstop for weeks.

Pre-op:

Post-op*:

*You will note that it actually looks redder, but in real life it looks more dark auburnish and — most important — not goth.

So against Alex’s better judgement, we went to see Against Me! play an all-ages show at the Opera House last night. I’m not a really big punk person but I sort of fell in love with the title track on “Searching for a Former Clarity”

These are the items I was wearing, to this punk show:

• Dark Jeans, rolled-up cuffs
• White button-down
• Argyle sweatervest
• Pearls (fake)
• Little white barette
• Pumas

I keep forgetting that I no longer have really a short geometric bob, so there’s really nothing to undercut it when I dress like a Taylor Townsend. You can imagine how thrilled I was when I met Alex on the subway and he was wearing his argyle sweatervest. “We’re going to get our asses kicked,” I said.

We got to Queen East early as I was hoping the box office would be open and I could pick up my tickets and then get dinner, but there were already teen punks lining up and no box office in sight, so we decided to just get some dinner. We passed a bar that looked like people were eating in it when we realized it was just a guy eating Pizza Pizza and drinking. Our options were Carribean or diner — we decided a diner was more punk rock.

So the show was pretty good. Now, I don’t go to a lot of all-ages punk shows. We stayed near the back because I was a little concerned that the crowd would be a little…rougher than the average Decemberists fan is used to. But is it really normal for kids to constantly crowd-surf onto the stage and then, during one song, to actually, like, kind of swarm the stage, such that there are like, forty kids up there, totally obscuring the band?

To their huge credit, Against Me! kept playing through the deluge.

We were standing right behind the tech guys. The band’s tech was just standing there with his hands on his head. When they cleared out, he turned to the house tech and said “And you wanted a barricade! Fool.”

When the show ended — with no encore, I guess not surprisingly — the house system came back on and started playing “Sweet Caroline” for no apparent reason. (We’d already ascertained that the house system was “some guy’s iPod” which had both Billy Idol and The Mountain Goats on it). The kids would chant “One more song!” but then when the chorus came on they’d all start singing the “bum bum bum,” proving that teen punks aren’t all that different from the Saturday night crowd at the Madison.

Yeah, I totally bought the Makeover shirt. I paid US$4.23 to have it shipped from a company whose mailing address is like four blocks away. My house may actually be closer than the nearest post office. Ah well, at least I’ll get it really fast.

It’s my reward for mailing out my first complete masters application, which I have done today.

What if I forgot something? Oh my. I know I didn’t because I went through the checklist really carefully, but man, that doesn’t make it not the first thing I thought when I handed it to the post office lady. At least now I know what I’m doing for when I do the other schools, which are far more likely to fund me.

Now it is officially time to turn my thoughts to Christmas. Cookies! Cleaning my apartment! Buying presents!

My mom and Alex both keep asking what I want this year and I really can’t come up with much. Seriously, it’s 90% kitchen stuff, which my mom can’t realistically give me because I would just have to carry it back to Toronto (stock pots don’t travel well). Alex keeps talking about buying me a madeleine tin, which I’ve dismissed as silly because I would so seldom use it, but how awesome would it be to be able to make my own madeleines?

So I was listening to the radio the other day and when I heard the White Stripes’ covering Tegan and Sara’s “Walking With a Ghost”.

I don’t think I can express how cool I think this is.

Tegan and Sara was the first indie show I ever went to, with Dan. We went over to talk to them after the show and they knew him as that guy who’d snuck back stage at a show of theirs a few months hence. (In a friendly way– it’s too bad that story’s not online anymore, I can’t do it justice.)

In other news, please give me three reasons I should not buy this shirt. Hell, give me one.