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I might eventually do some mailing-list-only content. Haven't decided. It's always an option. Cheers.

An oddity that's not really worth mentioning: I develop muscle tics when I'm under some kind of stress. Sometimes it's an uncontrollable finger twitch, but most of the time it's an eyelid twitch.

My right upper eyelid's been twitching for about 48 hours straight now. I wish it would stop.

I wish Mom would let me know how Dad's liver biopsy went. Sometimes the waiting is the worst.

The results were supposed to be back sometime between eleven a.m. and three p.m. By five p.m. I was verging on a nervous wreck. I didn't want to call; what if something had gone horribly wrong and they were trying to get things handled before calling me?

So I called my grandmother—who, it turned out, hadn't heard anything either, and was wondering what I was wondering.

What were Dad's biopsy results?How to explain to someone else that some results need to come in on time? That the waiting is the hardest part, and that the sheer frustration of not knowing is enough to drive daughters and other assorted family members to cluster around the nearest bottles of antacids?

My enemy is still nameless and faceless, but we know it lives in my father's bones.

Given that several of my friends grew up in northeast Arkansas, I would make a yearly Christmas-break pilgrimage to visit them and their families. My general rule: see as many people as possible, cause as little fuss as possible, and stay no more than two nights at any one house. Even under those circumstances, I could easily be gone for a week.

In the years that have passed, I've managed to forget all but the most amusing—or embarrassing—moments that occurred during those trips. I distinctly remember the drives Monica and I made back and forth to Paragould, and my complete and utter inability to use my normally-excellent poker face against Matthew. Matthew, of course, beat me senseless at poker and made me laugh the entire time.

(Luckily for me, I know Matthew well enough to know better than to play poker against him for money. Ever.)

So, Andrew asks, what did I think of the Oscar nominations? I think my overwhelming feeling was a complete and utter lack of surprise. I saw a lot of choices that could only be described as "safe." We rant about this every year, he and I, and for once I thought I'd be brave and daring and post my initial commentary today, before all the ad campaigns kick in to try to sway opinions.

I'll feel a bit better about my choices after I get to see a couple more movies, but I'm going to talk about all this in my usual pseudo-knowledgeable way. Hey, I pay enough in movie rental fees to finance a low-budget film or two; with that and a tiny dose of misplaced chutzpah, you too can be a movie critic!

Enjoy.

Best Picture

A Beautiful Mind
Gosford Park
In the Bedroom

I have something to confess. I refuse to hate Valentine's Day.

I don't care how chic and how cool it is to roll your blasé little eyes and sniff that it's a Hallmark Holiday, intended to incite guilt, financial debt, and extraneous rose-buying. I would defy every person who complains "but why should we mark one special day out of the year for this?" to not celebrate their next birthday on the principle that "I've already been born, so why should I pick out one special day to celebrate that fact?"

Do both, do neither, or shut up.

I just realized something. My statement about cooking disasters in my previous post wasn't the funniest cooking disaster ever.

Date: March 1, 2001. That day's entry was entitled 'All your Pyrex are explode to us.' My favorite line: "I've destroyed a lot of kitchen things over the past two years, but I've never made a pan explode before."

I present four pictures from this horrific event, which quite frankly speak for themselves:

I'm looking for some confirmation on this, but I suspect that peach cobbler is one of those homespun recipes that your good, standard Southern belles are supposed to carry as part of their genetic code. However, it seems that I inherited some recessive genetic goodness that meant I didn't know the recipe from birth. As a result, I lose this recipe at least once a year and have to go scrabbling on the 'net to find a new version.

There's a saying about happy and unhappy families which follows along the lines of "all happy families are alike, but the unhappy ones are all unique." It applies to more than just families. Major life events are like that, as well. After all, what's the fun in retelling the events of a perfectly normal and happy day?

No, we're much more interesting when events both bizarre and unexpected happen; we're at our most unique in the microseconds when we realize that life has just completely and utterly deviated from whatever predetermined plan we thought we were working under.

Most of my friends know that I have broken my right wrist twice, and most of them know that I broke it the first time while trying to fly a kite on a rainy day. Fewer know the story of the second break, despite the fact that it's a much more interesting and amusing story.

You face right, I face left.

You have your pile of CDs and I have mine. I am staring squarely at the cover to Leftfield's Rhythm and Stealth while you rip a compilation Gipsy Kings album. We've joked so long about doing this that it seems almost a little strange that at last, we're making good on our promise of finally taking our CD collection and ripping the songs to mp3.

"Ok, listen to this. See if you can't tell me who this is."

New music: John Mayer's album, Room For Squares. After hearing a song of his on Radio Paradise, I went digging, first for mp3s and then for a copy of the album. David Gray meets Dave Matthews, I think, but with a nice little touch of local Georgia music scene.I listened to it today while working on getting the CDs ripped—at last, at last, they are all ripped!

Kat was the last person to move out of the old wondergeek apartment last December. She called me up at home as she was preparing to go through what was left in the kitchen: "Do you want to come over here and take a look at this stuff to see if there's anything you can use?"

Later that afternoon, I came home with several bags full of an odd assortment of bottles and jars and frozen odds and ends. There was literally a bit of everything: pork, salmon, ketchup, extra-chunky marmalade, frozen blueberries. Every food group you could think of, and probably one or two you'd managed to forget.

Since that day, I've been trying to find the shelves in my fridge. They've been covered over with strange and unusual ingredients that don't match my usual round of recipes, and I've hesitated to buy much of anything new until I used up the freebies I had received from Kat.