mycalicocat

I am home from the hospital where all went well. I am minus one gall bladder and SIX stones and have some little scars that look sort of like an angry rooster jumped on my tummy. Am in no pain at all, but a little wobbly when it comes to getting up from chairs or beds, getting in and out of car and so on, and definitely will have to take it easy for a few days.
Anyway, back to the real purpose of life: Escape Reading.
I read Carl Hiaason's "Skinny Dip" while at the hospital and recommend it to anybody who likes good escape reading. (All of his books are fun and trashy in the same way that Janet Evanovich's and Elmore Leonard's books are, which is to say that he's a good writer who has decided to write entertainment.)
"Skinny Dip" is out in paperback now.
I've gotten where I've read so much popular fiction and am so much more aware of authors than titles, that I don't know from the title whether I've read a book or not. I have to stop in the store and read a few pages. Now I'm going to start on "Clouds of Witness" by Dorothy L. Sayers, whom I have mostly avoided for years, so it's new to me.
Anybody got any more recommendations along the "what to read while you're laid up" category?

I hope you all had a nice Christmas. I certainly did, and am happy to report to all calicocatters that among my Christmas gifts were a set of elegant stemless wine glasses from sPorcupine and a turkey roaster and fire extinguisher from Gretchen and Steve. Also much else, my children being gift geniuses.
We did something different this year. Our Christmas Eve dinner (ham, pecan apple stuffing, corn casserole etc.) came ready to heat up from Publix, and our Christmas dinner (smoked turkey, really good dressing and gravy, green bean casserole and macaroni and cheese) came from Sonny's. Christmas dinner was Uncle Wally's treat, and there was enough for a small army. This was all very good food, and having shopped for holiday meals countless times, I'd say that it didn't cost any more than cooking from scratch.
This came about by happenstance. Wally wanted to do something for us for Christmas and we had generally agreed on his providing the main dish -- which I thought was to be ham -- so I ordered the ham dinner at Publix, but it turned out he adamantly meant to have turkey, so he and Tina ordered the turkey dinner from Sonny's, and I decided I'd get the ham and sides anyway because I was tired of turkey and knew we needed something for Christmas Eve.
This turned out to be a very fortunate decision, because I was dopey from a shot of Demerol for most of Christmas Eve day, and had sort of a "What, me worry?" attitude toward the usual Christmas preparations.
That leads to the natural irony of taking vacation time. I will be off-line temporarily during this week to get my gall bladder taken out. I feel fine writing this and was fine through Christmas, but wasn't so fine about 2 a.m. Christmas Eve morning when I had a whopper of a gall bladder attack, so the plan is to take the useless thing out before there's another attack, but I'm having to wait for the drs. to come back from their Christmas celebrations.
I will keep you all posted on this, but it's nothing dire. I mainly just want to get it done and then read all my Christmas books.

In case you’ve had enough turkey and fruitcake, here’s a recommendation.
On one of my cooking-for-one rampages through Publix, I picked up a red and blue package called “Fast Fixin’ Seasoned Philly Beef Steak”
The package is red and blue.
Review: This is a zip-lock package of little slices of fully-cooked beef with onions, green and red peppers and is really good. Since I’m just one, the zip-lock package is great. I can grab out a bunch of the stuff , pop it in the mike for a minute and stuff it in a hoagie bun. I forgot to get cheese, which a Philly Beef is supposed to have. but have tried both with Heinz 57 and with Wasabi mayonnaise, with good results.
I recommend this for solo cooking or for lunchtime sandwiches.
Anybody else got any super-easy food ideas or products to recommend?
  

I’ve managed not to go into Macon Mall (or whatever it’s called now) for something like ten years, but today I wandered into the Galleria Mall in Warner Robins and wound up walking for what seemed like miles like a rat in an overcrowded maze. Not only that, but the stores were full of psuedo-stuff. There was a bookstore, but the books were all remaindered. There were five or six places to get your fingernails and toenails messed with, and I saw a woman with a booth for “magnetic jewelry,”   Granted this is a kind of ersatz mall, but why are there malls anyway?  What’s the attraction, and why have they displaced downtowns?

I write a weekly quiz for the paper, with several categories of questions, This is the Literary Quiz for this week. Googling is not only acceptable but inevitable. I am putting it here so that Barelyblogging can do it on Thursday as she prefers. Others are welcome to answer or just comment.

Here are five quotations from the literature of Christmas. Give the title and the author for each.

1. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?"

2.No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose..

3. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

4.It was the winter wild,/ While the Heav'n-born child,/ All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies..

5. He HADN'T stopped Christmas from coming!/IT CAME!

The closer my vacation gets, the more I'm looking forward to it. This is not a go-somewhere vacation, but a no=plan vacation, since I'm really taking it because otherwise I'd lose it.

This starts this Friday. I will go back to work on Jan. 2.

SO, starting with the assumption that some of this time will be Christmas-visity, what suggestions to any of you have about what to do with this two weeks, or with parts of it.

In other words, what would you do if you had this kind of time to do with as you pleased?

I'll welcome all suggestions, but -- more to the point -- describe what you'd do with it.

I may get some ideas from this about what I will do with my time if I ever actually retire.

I decided that for one of my Christmas food pages I would make some gingerbread men from scratch and found a recipe in this very fancy cookbook -- which called them gingerbread people. I bought cutters, and wound up getting big ones because I wanted a girl and boy of the same size. then I bought parchment paper, and one of those decorating kits. then I got a cramp in my leg, so I wound up doing a Christmas food page on punch, but this afternoon I finally got to the store to buy the ingredients. We didn't have any flour since Tina threw all the flour in the oven when we had the fire, so I got flour, and all the other ingredients, including real butter and a can of cloves and a can of allspice, and some brown sugar and molasses and vanilla frosting, and some eggs because I wasn't sure we had any at home. I came home and put the cookbook on the counter and followed all the instructions to the letter, winding up with an amount of gingerbread dough that looks big enough to make maybe six gingerpersons. I'm figuring they'll wind up costing about $8 apiece before I'm done.
However, I have to say that's the best raw cookie dough I ever tasted.

Are the rest of you having trouble technically with this blog or is it just at this end. I have had it sort of blink out on me in the middle of a post, and various other glitches. Just wrote a longish comment and suddenly it disappeared. Please let me know. I'm thinking of just creating a new blog. In fact until I hear from some of you regarding this one, I'll be working on another just to see if it is glitch free.

meantime, thanks for all your comments. I'm fine and looking forward to the vacation.

Can't believe I've abandoned this blog so long. But naturally I've got excuses. For one thing, my job has been like something Lewis Carroll wrote, and for another, I had this ailment which required taking medicines that lowered my IQ. Duh.
Have you ever had a cramp in your leg? You know those things that happen early in the morning and you jump out of bed and stomp around? Well, I had one in the parking lot of Kitchen Gallery in WarnerRobins, and it didn't go away from stomping around. It was my right leg, and that was on Russell Pkwy. (For those of you who don't live around here, 5 or 6 lanes of drivers who'd rather be flying jets). So I called Tina and off we went to the hospital, where their response was to give me two shots and three prescriptions. Zonk Snore. Then one of the meds made my legs swell up. Finally I got to my real doctor (who is a a darling young man) and he told to stop taking all the stuff and start taking this magnesium pill (Slo-mag).
And all through this, I was a newspaper person!! I mean that I covered three or four events and wrote about a dozen stories, long and short.
So what's the next topic?
Where do our work ethics come from? (It sure isnt about getting rich) What pushes us on when we'd rather fall across the sofa and watch some dumb sitcoms?
Why are some people comfortable with being lazy while other people rush out to work with weird things going wrong with their leg muscles? I think that maybe deep down i am convinced that if I ever really stop, I willwind down and never start up again.