Favorite Things

School shuns tech, teaches fountain pen.

How cool is that?

Okay... I have several fountain pens so of course I think it's cool. They sit upright in a old Waterford cream pitcher next to my computer at home.

"The pens improve the quality of work because they force the children to take care, and better work improves self-esteem," principal Bryan Lewis said. "Proper handwriting is as relevant today as it ever has been."

"I don't see fountain pens as old-fashioned or outmoded. Modern fountain pens are beautiful to use; it's not like in the old days of broken nibs and smudging," Lewis said. "We have a particular writing style and we have developed it very carefully and found a way that allows left- and right-handed people to write without smudging."

I'll preen a tad and admit I've always been complimented on my handwriting ~ it's even better when I use one of my fountain pens. I have one Montblanc (my parents picked it up for me in Europe a couple of years ago) and the rest are Waterman's. The pens I've bought for myself I have found at eBay.

Man I feel sorry for whomever has to clean up after me when I'm dead. I've got the oddest assortment of stuff in my life: fountain pens, mis-matched Waterford crystal, colored glass collection, gemstones, Christmas ornaments, Spode, Lladro, Wedgewood, Royal Doulton (no hand-painted periwinkles however), tons of needlepoint and cross stich, quilts, hand-made pillows, lace work, and several lambs worth of yarn... and this is after two tag sales and giving stuff to family!

Do you collect anything? Do you have too much stuff in your life?

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Forgot to add that I won US$24 in poker on Saturday night.

Oh, and no one died from eating the cookies.

Peanut Butter Cookies

For YaYa poker night my sister has asked me to bring my infamous heart attack on a plate cookies. I'm cheating and uploading my recipe (and story) from another site I posted it to a while back.

This recipe originally came to me from my maternal grandmother. Back in the day, she mixed this by hand, with a wooden spoon, in the large yellow bowl I inherited from her. The first time I made the recipe by myself I marveled at upper arm strength of that little lady. I couldn't make the dough budge! I needed a electric handmixer, which burned out by the time I got the dough together. As a result, I didn't make these cookies very often. Having to buy a new handmixer everytime I made these cookies made them too expensive.

Three years ago my parents gave me a Kitchen-Aide standmixer for Christmas. I was floored! I couldn't believe they would get me such a cool, and expensive, gift. The first thing I made in that mixer were these cookies. My stepfamily had never had them because they were just too expensive to make. Everyone loved them and they've become a staple of our Christmas cookie baking tradition.

Ingredients:

2 cups shortening
2 cups white sugar
2 cups brown sugar
4 eggs, well beaten
1 jar of peanut butter, 18 ounces **
5 cups flour, well sifted
4 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon of salt
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract

** Find the cheapest peanut butter you can. Generic works well. The brand name peanut butters on the market do not give you enough peanut butter flavor, in my opinion. Organic peanut butters work well, if you don't mind mixing the peanut butter together first. Don't skimp on the vanilla extract. If you can afford it, get the best extract you can find.

Pre-heat your oven to 375 degrees. Line up your baking sheets and, if you have Silpats, line your baking sheets with them. With the amount of fat and oil in this recipe, the cookies don't usually stick to the baking sheets, but using Silpat just makes clean up easier.

In a small bowl, crack your four eggs. Beat them well and then set them aside. In the largest bowl you have (five quarts is just big enough for this recipe) put in the shortening, sugar, peanut butter, extract and then add the eggs. Mix these ingredients together until creamy smooth. In a sifter, place the flour, baking soda and salt; slowly sift in the dry ingredients to the creamy mixture. Sift in about a cup at a time, mixing the dry into the creamy between cups. By the time you get the last cup of dry ingredients into the bowl, you will have either a sore arm or a burned out mixer.

I don't usually chill the dough before I begin baking. The choice is yours. I use a measured tablespoon to place the dough on the baking sheets. They are half round and I then use a fork to flatten them out, making the traditional cross-hatch pattern on the dough. I can get 16 cookies on a baking sheet this way. The entire recipe makes roughly 90 cookies. I say roughly because we eat the raw dough as we go, so I don't know, exactly, how many cookies this recipe is supposed to make. Bake the cookies for 12 to 15 minutes and place on a rack to cool.

If you have a heart condition and eat these cookies, I will not be held responsible.

Friday Night Poker

I made it home sober. With shoes.

Yeah, it was that boring.

I had two slices of pizza, one Cosmo, a canoli, lost US$16, and was back home and in bed before midnight.

Sweet beybey jesu, Bingo night at St. MaryTheresaHolyNamewhatever would have been more exciting.

The most interesting conversation of the night? What television shows we like. And even that moronic topic tappered off into nothingness after a minute or two.

We're skipping December.

No one will either notice or care.

For the rest of the weekend I just unplugged. I got laundry and the dreaded grocery shopping done and then read for the rest of Saturday (Queen Emma And The Vikings: A History of Power, Love, And Greed In Eleventh-Century England and The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, if you are curious). On Sunday I crocheted while listening to "American Experience" on PBS - about the Kennedy family. Like I needed to learn anything else about the most dysfunctional family in the United States.

I remembered the Leonid showers driving into work this morning.

Maybe I shouldn't bitch about how boring poker was considering just how mindblowingly boring the rest of my life is.

I ignored the talking heads because they just make me want to kill them all slowly and painfully with long pointy sticks and rabid screaching wombats.

I ignored the rest of broadcast/cable televsion because, seriously? there is nothing on.

So it wasn't until today I saw TomKat had gotten hitched.

'Never-ending kiss' caps TomKat wedding.

I'm still hurling.

Issues:

1) Katie... dear... HE IS A FUCKING FREAK! Hello, Scientology? Haven't you had enough clues NOT TO MARRY THIS GUY?

After exchanging vows before a Scientology minister Saturday, Cruise and Holmes engaged in a "never-ending kiss," according to Giorgio Armani, who attended the wedding outside Rome and designed the outfits of the bride, the groom and their baby, Suri.

2 years. Tops.

2) Women who have BRED, given BIRTH!, should not wear white to their goddamn wedding.

EVER!

It should be so freakin' obvious that you wouldn't need a law... but...

New Law: No woman gets to wear white unless she can PROVE she is a VIRGIN!

Having the child you gave birth to attend said wedding is another clue you shouldn't be WEARING WHITE!

Look, the conservative whack jobs in this country want to codify what marriage is, who can and cannot get married - I say fine, bring it on! Let's start at the beginning, shall we? If you are too stupid not to know that wearing white means you are a VIRGIN... maybe you shouldn't be allowed to get married at all.

AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

I hate weddings.

Everything comes before the whole reason to get married.

3) The only thing worth two months salary... DeBeer's stupid commercial which flashes a gignormous rock on the screen with the above voice over.

The only thing worth two months salary is a DOWN PAYMENT ON A HOUSE!

4) Wedding dresses starting at US$1,000. There isn't US$100 worth of material in the damn things, which you will only wear once regardless of how many times you get married (and yeah, each time the dumb dodo's will wear white). I could almost understand if you wore the damn dress several times, but once? A grand and a whole lot more on a dress you will never, ever wear again?

5) The never-ending angst over the band, the food, the colors (and what the fuck is this about? The bride has to pick her colors? Is it a wedding or a fucking joust?), who sits where, limos, first dance, alcohol... and on and on and on. I've been a bridesmaid twice, maid of honor once. That those three women are still alive is a fuckin' miracle. I deserve to be Sainted because I am responsible for THREE MIRACLES!

By the way, the longest any of those three marriges lasted? 3 years. Uh huh. All three of them put their parents into hock (their parents own stupid fault). All three got engagement rocks the size of Gibralter because the first one (or, in once case, THREE) selected rings weren't good enough for their highnesses - all three of which got pawned before the ink was dry on the divorce papers. One of these first-class broads even got alimony for reasons I will never, ever, understand except that the groom was such a fucking moron I didn't even feel bad for him.

Thankfully, none of these people spawned before or after the intial wedding. They have all since remarried (wearing white), spawned, divorced, spawned, remarried (yup, in white), spawned some more. One of them has been married five times in the last twenty years. Wore white each time.

I've got at least ten pages of ranting about brides maid/maid of honor dresses that has all been written before. But what is with this new trend of the Mother of the Bride dressing up like she's the one getting married?

Don't even get me started on the goddamn tiaras.

And why, in this day and age, do we still have Bridal Showers? Just so we can buy sleazy underwear that we would never be caught dead in to give to someone else who will probably never wear it? This makes sense?

sigh

Every single wedding I have ever been a part of - family, guest, attendant - the same thing is said at the rehearsal ever single time:

We have to write our vows

Let's see... it's T -12 and counting to the ceremony and now you assholes are thinking of this? Shouldn't you two have been thinking about what marriage means before the rehearsal?

We have to write our vows

But if you have two vaginas or two penises... well that's just wrong! Wrong I say! The Bible says... something about that! Wrong, wrong, wrong and you're going to Hell.

Yeah, whatever.

Marriage, naturally, leads to divorce:

The McCartney meltdown has lessons for all marriages

No-fault divorce will never happen, though, until society gets over its undue veneration of marriage. Commercialised at the entry stage (all those gift-wrapped electric woks) and at the exit (all those lawyers' fees), it is invested with fake dreams. While many marriages are long and happy, some are little more than a charade in which the irreligious make promises they will not keep to someone else's god. Even those who marry in civil ceremonies are bound by the same legal strictures.

In France, where the 'pacte civil de solidarité' gives tax and immigration breaks to heterosexual and same-sex couples alike, marriage is plummeting. The option of civil partnerships allowing for simple, non-adversarial dissolution must be better for men, women and children than a system that offers nothing between the insecurity of informal bonds and a contract still prone to end in feuding.

I knew I loved France for a reason.



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Update:

Saw this headline on top of google news:

TomKat wedding 'a stunt':

The cynics among us may not be surprised, but there are reports this morning the "wedding of the year" was a stunt.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes have admitted they were actually married four days before their Rome extravaganza, staging a big show to promote the Church of Scientology.

It's been reported a Scientologist advisor was placed at every table at the reception to answer questions.

Roman clergy say the sham is insulting and Bracciano's mayor is considering taking back the honorary citizenship she offered after the couple refused to wave to well-wishers.

I'm all for TomKat being the next Secretary of State. All in favor, say Aye!


How's about just Ambassador to Italy?

In case you are wondering

yes, it is a very boring day at the office.

Economist Milton Friedman dies at 94.

You can read more about him at Wiki. You can thank him for the way we withhold payroll taxes in the US.

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And the winner for the 2006 Darwin Award is...

Man accidently shoots himself in groin

oh, wait... he didn't die. Oh well, moron, better luck next time, eh?

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Strong Leonid Meteor Shower Expected This Weekend.

Wo0t! I'll try to head upstate to see if I can see this meteor shower. There's too much light pollution around my area to see much of anything, usually.

For more information on the Leonids, see Space.com.

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Tomorrow is Ladies Poker Night at my sister's house. Featuring Cosmo's. I may have to fight the dog for the couch.