The sugar is in from the store and the new table is lying in pieces, half of them stained, on the front porch. One set of side railings and the bottom platform are stained and drying, slowly, in the chilly breeze slamming in from the north-northeast.

We are south of the ice line, which, tonight, is going to hover somewhere near Nashville. Here, we will have nothing but chilly winter rain.

My hands smell like wood stain, but several pieces of tight-grained, pale wood now bear a golden-brown color some company or other has chosen to call "golden oak." The grain, originally little more than freckles or dashes in the wood, now contrasts as a darker brown against the gold of the rest of the wood.

Once upon a time, there was a kitty, and, like most kitties, this kitty had a birthday. While this kitty said very little about her birthday, when her back was turned, many of the other cats gossiped about it. "Whatever shall we get Miss Kitty for her birthday?" they said.

Jeff asked me the other night, "How do I get those friendly error pages like what you've got on domesticat?" I told him how, and helped him get set up, and realized along the way that such a package, while pretty simple overall, could be interesting to other people.

Were it even remotely steamy, it could be called something along the lines of a rendezvous, but let's be realistic about who we're talking about here. Me. Instead, this afternoon could best be termed "sneaking off to see a movie with a fellow movie geek." I don't exactly specialize in salacious excitement (if that hasn't become blatantly obvious by now, there's just no teaching you).

Here's hoping that the 'rice' section of the site takes on a life of its own. After I started posting photos of the excruciatingly dumb things that people willingly do to their cars, Jeremy immediately piped up and said, "I have a couple of photos for you…"

…and what winners they are!

hsv_red_mazda
at , Skyline Acres, Alabama, United States by domesticat.

Give your weblog reader literary joys to last them through the holiday season:

As my friends can attest, I just went all zappy and silly about The Two Towers after reading James Berardinelli's review (in which he gave it four stars out of a possible four). Like last year, I waited impatiently to get my hands on Berardinelli's review, knowing that his taste in movies so closely mirrors mine as to be eerie.

The words that I'm hearing most about the first two installments of the Lord of the Rings trilogy indicate that we may be in the privileged position of watching one of the great events of cinema history as it happens.
But, no matter how good The Two Towers is (and I have not seen it yet, so I cannot speak with firsthand knowledge), I don't believe Peter Jackson will come home from this year's Oscars with anything more than token awards for technical achievement.

Dear Santa,

Since you don't seem to have a claims or complaints department, it looks like I have to address this complaint directly to you. I realize that today is the 23rd of December, and that you're plenty busy putting together packages for all the good little kids, but given that I'm about to fall asleep where I sit, I don't think this complaint can wait much longer.

Christmas Eve. The last thing standing between my current state of consciousness and Christmas morning was a few hours and a vast, primal craving for mint chocolate chip ice cream that felt more akin to heroin withdrawal than a mere, mortal craving.

I was drinking tea on the couch, doubled up on sugar and memories. I had the remote control. Jeff and I were browsing through the wan, unappealing TV listings. This was the night of endless nutcrackers and carols, and there was not even a hope of halfway-intriguing television between then and dawn on the twenty-sixth.

I was trying not to think of home, in the same desperation and utter lack of success that one might encounter while desperately attempting to avoid thinking of a white elephant after having one suggested in conversation.* * * * *

"If we stay up late enough we could watch the local meteorologists track Santa during the evening news."

Kat: "I think we're going to need a buffet table for all this food."

From a Saturday-night email dated mid-September of this year: "Our Recruitment office is doing really well. Normally, this is good, but come Christmastime, it's a royal financial pain in the tail to buy gifts for everyone in the group. Yeah, yeah, I know gift-giving is supposed to be a 'gift,' not a 'right,' but lots of things work out differently in theory than in practice… Would you be interested in drawing names for a Christmas exchange this year?"

You know your group of friends has expanded when you remember when planning for your yearly Christmas party once was "scrawl down a list of friends' names, email everyone to see if they're available next Saturday, and make something edible." Something edible, of course, meant "I'll figure out what I'm cooking sometime later." You know things have changed when this year's holiday party planning involves lunch with two other friends, details, and actual division of labor.

Fast-forward three months to what jokingly became known as the Pan-Holiday Extravaganza; too late for Christmas, too early for New Year's.

In the grand southern tradition, we gathered together and ate copious amounts of food. It could be said that geeks don't cook, and this would probably be a true statement if the geek in question was Jeremy (whose sworn duty for the PHE was to obtain carbonated drinkage), but the rest of us appear to have mastered the art of applying varying amounts of heat to tasty morsels of edible matter:

Roast turkey, ham, sweet potato casserole, corn, baked beans, green bean casserole, salad-of-doom, rosemary and garlic mashed potatoes, three kinds of freshly-baked bread, turtle cake, pumpkin cheesecake, turtle cheesecake, pecan pie...

Why, yes, we did explode. Whatever made you guess?