PlazaJen: Passion Knit

Between the icy chill in our offices, and the fact I need to make 72 cookies tonight, and the Large Project I've been working on having the due date extended, I pretty much am set to GO! NUTS! NOW! No snarky remarks about verbs and do I really need to go, aren't I already there? Now is not a time to trivialize the crazy.

It's two weeks until we celebrate Christmas with the Wo's side of the family. Two teenagers to buy for, and everyone says, "OH just get them a gift card" and when I hear that, it makes me want to get out the recipe for decorative inedible bread and whip them up a French loaf, each, because while I love gift cards, they have their place, and I'm sorry, but being a teenager and allllll you-know, distraught about being downtrodden and misunderstood, well, that just goes hand-in-glove with getting weird shit from your crazy aunt & uncle, or whatever we are to them, I think they're technically JWo's cousins, but the age difference allows me to elevate our status.

You know what? There's just not enough good pictures of inedible, decorative bread on the internet. A dearth, as it were. If you don't know what I'm talking about, well, imagine if you will taking the time to make something that LOOKS like homemade bread, but you shellac it and it's decorative! My mother made a whole big bunch when I was um, 6 or 7, and even then, I thought, Huh. This is rather stupid, because WE CAN'T EAT IT. But, then again, it was 1975. I did learn, however, in my internet searching (via the Google, is there any other way?) that Iowa, which does not have a sales tax on food, DOES tax inedible decorative gourds.

I think we're giving the girl various foo-foo girly products, and the boy? I think he's getting a large can of cashews. Because one year, the first year I started to really feel some footing in this family, at Christmas, said boy was rooting through a large can of Chex Mix, and PICKING OUT ALL THE CASHEWS, and it was like my father was right there inside me, and sparks flew out my eyes and my hair stood on end, and I actually ordered him to STOP IT RIGHT NOW. (The super exciting part of that story was the fact he actually listened to me and stopped it.) So maybe a big ol' can of cashews would be kind of funny. At least I know he'll eat them. Perhaps if I had more time, I could hone my skills on inedible lifelike cashew replicas..... hah!

See what I mean? Crazy. It came. It stayed. It may not leave until January....