Senora Frog

As promised, here's a pic of one of the frogs I'm doing for my nieces. Her green sister is still in progress, and only has about half of one arm at the moment. I'm a really basic crocheter. Nothing fancy. But luckily this pattern from Lion Brand just cruises the edges of my abilities. And of course, I had to put my own stank on it. I doubled the size, and did knitted i-cord arms and legs. The single crochet limbs on the original pattern looked to wimpy. A frog's gotta have some jumping power, ya know? If I can get done with the green frog in time, I think I'm going to go back and put blue lips on this one. The red lips just aren't enough of a contrast.

Technically, my nieces are probably too old for stuffies. But it's still kind of fun to get one on Christmas.

Wheez the People

On Saturday, I made myself lay down and just stop. All afternoon. I’d sleep, drink orange juice, sleep, have a cookie, sleep, watch tv, sleep. Punctuated by a lot of couching, hacking, sneezing and hauking. Such a pretty image. I’d been dragging butt for a week and a half with a raunchy cold, and I thought if I just slept it off, I might finally kick the crud. Then I did much the same on Sunday morning, adding in crocheting frogs for my nieces (fantastically cute – I’ll post pics). But it was really just a re-group and get over this damned cold once and for all thing.

Being out of commission has its advantages. I missed the entire start of this round of trouble in Gaza. I hate trouble in that area. Freaks me out no end (I think it’s a hangover from my Baptist school days; nothing says Armageddon like trouble in the Holy Land). But I also felt like I accomplished nothing. You know how in the roll up to the holidays, you’re just a machine. Your whole weekend is nothing but checking items off your list – bought this, cleaned that, mailed this, baked that. After all that, it’s kind of hard to see laying on the couch, filling tissue after tissue and shotgunning Robitussin straight from the bottle as a real achievement. Woo-hoo kicked snot’s ass! Yeah!

Dr. Horrible would be so proud

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081225/ap_on_sc/do_it_yourself_dna

Okay. These people have no excuse. If they are geeky enough to want to bio-engineer life forms in their garage, then I know for a fact that they are geeky enough to have watched every sci-fi-mad-scientist-creates-thing-that-is-supposed-to-save-mankind-but-turns-into-a-hideous-phlegm-monster-or-turns-people-into-brain-eating-zombies movie ever made. These are the kind of people for whom Mystery Science Theater was invented. What up, my geeks?

And while I applaud the initiative they are taking, I also offer this Asimovian word of caution: glow-in-the-dark bacteria that makes yummy yogurt safe for the world to enjoy = good; a 40-foot strawberry yogurt mutant with lactobacillus minions the size of Volkswagen Beetles = bad. Tinkering with the wee beasties is not for the faint of heart. Lets be careful out there, kids.

Re: Obama Holiday Snaps

To every Russian who ooooed and ahhhed and made a big old fuss over the shirtless pictures of Vladimir Putin from his fishing holiday awhile back: Booya! Take that, beeyotch! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! How ya like that kind of arms escalation!

Holiday Cheers

Happy Holidays to one and all! Whatever holiday you celebrate. I'm of a mind to celebrate them all. More jollies for me.

And as a holiday tip, I thought I'd share: I got an e-mail from World Market that they are running their Electric Reindeer wines for half-price. I don't know if pricing is consistent across the country, but in my neck of the woods that makes them about $2.50. And it's not a bad low-cost hooch.

But here's something I discovered last Christmas. We found a bottle of the Electric Reindeer White Zinfandel that had been shoved to the back of the cabinet. My guess is that it was 2 years old. I've always heard that the best rule for cheap wine is to drink it immediately. For the most part they don't age well at all. But we decided, what the heck? Popped the cork and found that this particular bottle had turned into something amazing. It tasted like a really expensive Sauternes. Sweet and full-bodied, like peaches and honey. Whatever magic can happen in a wine bottle did. Like an alcoholic Christmas miracle.

Anyway. If you can find the ER White Zin for a couple of bucks, I'd suggest buying 2. One to shove in the back of a cabinet and hope that you'll have a little miracle a couple of years from now. And one to drink right now, just for, ahem, comparison purposes. Cheers, y'all.