fenchurch | Commence Headless Chicken Mode

It's almost 2:30am and I'm still not in bed. What's worse is that we're leaving in the morning and we're nowhere near ready to go. I think I've gotten all the presents wrapped, and I've decided that whatever is left will just have to wait until we get to my in-laws' place. Oh, and those last few remaining Christmas/Holiday cards that still haven't been sent? Riding in the car for 13 hours should be the perfect time to scrawl small notes so I don't feel too guilty for not having contacted some of these people in a year (or more). But, hey! Cards are getting sent! There was even a big batch that went out today... I think this is the first time in about six or ten years or something that I've sent more than four or five cards out. Yay me!

I made my first ever batch of Chocolate Crackles today, as part of some goodie (goody? Neither of those look right) plates we made for local friends. They actually turned out really well! I suspect, though, that they're the sort of thing that's rather tough to mess up. Question for my Aussie friends: Do they need to be refrigerated after the initial "setting up" time? Or can they be kept at room temperature safely?

I realized I haven't mentioned any of the updates on our big Christmas present (i.e. the kitchen -- we figure it's present enough for the both of us) recently. So, you can either start again at the beginning or you can skip over some of the intervening steps and go straight to the more "finished" kitchen (this is also the page where I started hyperlinking to larger versions of the pictures, for those with the bandwidth to handle it... 'cause those pared down versions really don't show up terribly well). I love my kitchen. It is a beauteous thing, and I'm still in shock that my cookbooks all fit in those bookcases.

I had another surreal moment yesterday... another midday conversation with my Aunt that went something like this:

Me: Hello?
Aunt (no hello or anything): So how did Faith go evil?
Me (brain shifting gears): Um, she killed a human and sorta flipped out, then joined up with the Mayor.
Aunt: Oh. But she goes good again, right?
Me: Yeah, but now that you mention it, that actually happens on another show.

I then explain about the Mayor, the Deputy Mayor, the show "Angel," and that no, Spike isn't going to be back again during the season she's watching but he'll show up in the next one. Even with the shortened version of the seasons that she's getting on FX (since I'm guessing they're showing more than one episode a day), she's getting impatient for Spike to reappear. Apparently, it's just a case of good genetics breeding good taste. ;-)

I know there were some other things I wanted to mention when I finally got around to updating my LJ, but I'll be darned if I can remember what they are. And it occurs to me that I'm tired enough that I may have just typed a bunch of complete gibberish that only looks like organized words to my sleep-craving brain. When I'm tired like this, I have a tendency for inserting random words and letters -- tossing an extra "q" in randomly or typing things like "The quick brown fox jumped snorkel over the lazy dog" and never noticing the extraneous word (which would be "quick" -- everyone knows brown foxes are speedy) no matter how many times I reread it.