cookie party, 2009

How does a tradition start? By doing the same thing year after year, I guess, or at least doing it enough times that people start to say, "oh yeah, doesn't Kate throw a cookie party every year?"

So, since there was a party in 2006 (which I totally forgot about until I was writing this piece!), one in 2007, and one in 2008, I guess that by doing it in 2009, I'm actually on the path to a real-live tradition!

This year's cookie party was once again fabulous, with frosting flying every which way, and sprinkles (like pine needles or beach sand) ending up in the strangest places.

The attendees this year were both new and old. Andrea and Lisa (with the boys) repeated from years past, and Patricia and Ellyn joined up anew. (Keri and Avery didn't make it that day, but were with us in spirit.)

The improvements I made over previous years -- more actual food! more presents for the children! -- were tremendous. This year I served rosemary butternut squash lasagna, garlic mint potatoes, bean soup, sugared cranberries, and apple almond quinoa. The number of debilitating sugar headaches dropped dramatically!

The OCD factor was back, as Andrea had missed last year's party, and this year, her meticulous decorating skills inspired Ellyn and Patricia to reach new heights, in an effort to reach the winners' circle. Max -- who is now six and a half -- was also driven to "make a contender." So driven, in fact, that he created about sixty five thousand contenders (not realizing, of course, that he had his own category -- the Under Seven Cookies).

The boys, in fact, had some creative decorating techniques. Max's plan of attack was to wad a glob of frosting into the middle of the cookie (for best dispersal later) and then to dump a handful of sprinkles into the palm of his hand. With a somewhat slow rotation of his wrist, 70% of the sprinkles landed on the table or floor, 5% hit the dry part of the cookie and about 25% reached the glob of frosting. So, of course, to meet with satisfactory sprinkling results, the process had to be repeated four times for each cookie.

Having just swept and mopped my floor (and knowing full well I'd have to do it again after the party), Lisa and I made valiant attempts to curb this decorating method. To no avail, of course, because a child under 7 + sugar + lots more sugar + anyone saying "no" = Disaster, Pure and Simple.

Charlie, on the other hand, had a strangely more self-contained approach to frosting. Which is to say, he frosted himself. He got some on a cookie (probably by accident) and the rest of it on his pants, hair, shirt, brother, seat... He reached for sprinkles once, but that idea was quickly squashed by the entire apartment. And he seemed fairly pleased with the prospect of merely frosting himself. (And, the rim of a volcano, as you'll see below.)

But enough talk, already, Kate! Let's see the winners!

In the Under Seven Category, Max was the all around winner!

The best traditional cookies:
Clockwise from top: "Jew" cookie by Lisa, "Glove" by Ellyn, OCD Tree by Patricia, OCD Bear by Andrea, and Self-Strangulating Snowman by Yours Truly.
In the Best Non-Traditional Category:

Clockwise from top left: Awkward Teenage Bear (complete with acne and the ugly outfit his mother made him wear) by Andrea, Creepy French Manicure Hand by Kate, The Shitting Dove of Peace by Ellyn (note the poop in the crack of the cookie), Festive Lederhosen Guy with Big Package by Patricia, and Almond Coat Bear by Ellyn.
And everybody's favorite category... The Ugliest!!

Clockwise from top left: Cracky Bear by Lisa, Flickery-Vagina-y Lightbulb by Kate, Amoeba by Patricia, Plaguey Pig by Ellyn, Clean-the-Table CandyCane by Kate, and Max's contribution to the Ugly field, which really isn't all that ugly, actually...

I feel eternally grateful to these women for making my life, my home, and my kitchen all the friendlier and warmer. It is starting to feel like without the party, it might not be Christmas.

now that I'm older and wiser, my posts will be, too!

Yeah, that's a lie. I have absolutely no plans to up the quality of what you find here, even though I'm now 33.

Do I feel bad about that? Yeah, kind of. To use a phrase Fernando employs when he does something really stupid and feels awful about, "I'm sorrytarded."

So here are a few of my observations since we last saw each other.

1. I saw a fabulous dance piece recently, called Nut/Cracked. Unfortunately, it's closing today (I knew I should have posted sooner!) but it's a more modern version of the Nutcracker. I'm not a big modern dance fan, but this piece was terrific! My favorite moment was a solo where this woman walks on stage, unrolls a sheet of bubble wrap about three feet wide by five feet long and then spends the next six minutes NOT stepping on it. Flailing herself over it, wiggling around it, I'm-not-touching-you-I'm-not-touching-you it, until finally, she can't stand it any longer and then just flings her body, full force, smack into the middle of the sheet with the most gratifying POPPOPPOPPOPPOPPOPPOP of all time! Like a pig in shit or a kid in frosting, there is no way around the fact that this was orgasmic.

In truth, it made me want to go home and get some bubble wrap.

2. At work the other day, a woman stopped by my office.

"I have a problem I need you to look at in my email," she said.

"Ok, what is it?"

"It's Sarah."

"Who's Sarah?"

"I think you should come and see."

So I got up, walked over to her desk and looked at her inbox. She was drowning in emails from Sarah. All 87 of them had the same subject: "Sarah has added you on FuckBook!"

"Who is this Sarah?" asked my co-worker, "And what, exactly, does she think I'm going to do on FuckBook?"

The best part of all this? Not my co-worker hounding Fernando with stories of FuckBook for twenty minutes in a row (although that was really funny). No, it was having to forward the message to the head of IT, asking for help to block the emails from Sarah from FuckBook.

Wheee! Legitimate use of the word Fuck at work!

3. I would like to take a moment to thank all the cute guys of the world who actually look good in tight pants for wearing them. And, while I'm at it, to send a reminder to the not-so-cute guys in the world, who don't look good in tight pants, to go out and invest in some lovely khakis. You know, the ones with AMPLE room in the seats...

a cure for holiday loneliness

The holidays can be tough -- causing some people to feel despondent, bummed out, and just plain lonely. If you fall into that last category, perhaps you should spend more time with quality people online.

Visit your pals at Hot Chicks with Douchebags. There, you can mix and mingle with fine examples of humanity (and the nasty-assed guys they allow themselves to photographed with).

Like your friend, Cheeto-Man and his girlfriend:

If they don't lift your spirits, how about a visit with People of Public Transit?

The "Pole Polisher" should cheer you up a bit:

No? You're still feeling lonesome? Head over to your local Walmart and visit with the People of Walmart...

And yeah, you're welcome. Go ahead and happily hide under the bed for the rest of the season. We'll come and get you in the middle of January.

on singleness and chocolate

A vegan chocolate cake recipe that is surprisingly good:

1 1/2 cups of flour

3/4 cups of sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon of baking soda

3 Tablespoons of cocoa

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 Tablespoon vinegar

1 cup water

Mix them all together and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

(I bring this up because the odds are good that you have all these ingredients at home, sitting there waiting for you. And you don't need any of the fancy ones, like butter, eggs, milk, pudding, etc. I'm just saying that, in a pinch, this satisfies one's need for chocolate.)

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I would like men to come with manuals. (Ha! MAN-uals!) They think we're confusing, but if we're confusing, it's only because they're bewildering.

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Names I never want to scream in passion in the heat of the moment:

Harold

Howard

Norman

Walter

Horace

Herman

Mohammed

Luigi

Jesus

Big Papa

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One problem with being single and living alone is that if you buy a bag of chocolate chips, accidentally open them, and then proceed to eat the entire bag, you have no one else to blame but yourself. Nobody came along and ate "just a handful." Sure, you may have dropped one or two, but not three hundred calories' worth.

Nope, you (and you alone) ate that whole bag. (It's amazing, though, how they can cram such a small bag full of 1400 chips -- knowing that each one only has one calorie...)

less content, more fluff!

I was on a date a while ago and the guy I was with said something deep and profound and prefaced it by saying something like "Well, you know what de Tocqueville says... [insert deep and profound thing here.]"

I looked at him, smiled nerdishly and said, "You've been waiting all day to quote de Tocqueville, haven't you?"

He looked at me, smiled nerdishly and said, "I paraphrased him, I didn't quote him."

Touche, date, touche.

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Overheard at work recently:

"Don't let the door hit you where the good lord split you."

"Nut up or shut up"

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The heat came on in my apartment recently. For a whole day, my home smelled like hot dust.

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So there's a great DIY arts and crafts organization called Etsy. (I think it's short for something, but I don't know what.) They have a whole website where you can buy and sell homemade stuff. And this, of course, has spawned another fabulous website... have you seen regretsy?

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Fernando got two enormous boxes of something delivered to the office recently. So of course, I had to climb into one of them and pop out and shout "SURPRISE!" when he came back into the office. Yes, he knew I was in there. Yes, he laughed anyway. (I love this guy.)

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"I will continue to microwave halibut in the company lunch room every single day until such time as you sign all of my expense reports." (Awesomeness.)

on chickens and eggs (but mostly eggs)

I've been a vegetarian for over a year now, so if there's one thing I know how eat, it's eggs. A major source of protein in my diet, these small ovules are delicious, nutritious, and constantly available in refrigerators near you. (And, of course, when I say "you," I mean "me.")

So when a suitor sent me a link on how to cook the perfect boiled egg (telling me, strangely, that the article made him think of me), I figured it had to be funny or particularly well written (since the topic was less than scintillating). Because it's really not hard to boil eggs. To quote a GEENYUS, "it's not rocket surgery."

Sadly, the article did not rock my world. (No offense J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.) I thought it would suggest hard boiling eggs with rocket fuel or in the microwave or something new-fangled and exciting. Instead, it merely proposed not bringing the water to a boil when hard boiling eggs, providing lots of attractive scientific method to prove the goodness of this idea. So, even though it seemed painfully counter intuitive, I was willing to try J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's method. (Because, realistically, I liked the suitor and thought it would give us something to talk about.)

I have had the worst week of hard boiled eggs in my life.

The method of hard boiling the eggs proposed by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt did not get my eggs cooked all the way through. So while the yolk is less dry and more appealing, THE WHITES ARE GOOPY.

Nobody likes goopy whites. Nobody. Homeless people scoff at goopy whites, and even Sally Struthers' starving children are skeptical. Chickens will drown themselves in a rainstorm before claiming to have produced a goopy-whited egg. So needless to say, I've been miserable.

The other problem is that the shells stick to the whites. And to a hungry girl in the middle of the afternoon, there is little more frustrating than taking an item of food that is a mere two cubic inches and trying to peel away a fraction of a millimeter of that food, only to have about a cubic inch of food stuck to the peelings.

I am not pleased, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. Not pleased at all.

(And things didn't work out with the suitor, either.)

collected thoughts on jury duty

I served my time today. I showed up for jury duty.

Here are some observations:

8:30-11:00 The Jury Room

Remember the teacher's voice in Charlie Brown? Imagine hearing that give you step by step directions on how to fill in the equivalent of a credit card application.

Also, there was a fabulous movie on the history of jury trials. All I could think about was how psyched the actors were who landed those roles. "Dude! I'm going to be in a jury duty film that they'll show in Brooklyn court rooms for decades! Sweet!"

11:00-1:00 The Empaneling Room

The empaneling room was all of 10'x20' and there were 23 of us in there. It was painted in an exciting shade of Doldrums Gray and the temperature in there was a brisk 98.6 degrees. Perfect attention paying weather!

Three different attorneys explained judicial procedures to us. I fought to stay awake.

"Ms. Neal, do you think you could be impartial in this case? Give both sides a fair shake? Let the chips fall where they will? The case is a blank blackboard and we'll fill it up with evidence. Do you think you could make a decision based on that evidence, and not on anything else? Are you a fair person?"

"Yes."

"Great! Mr. MacDuffy, do you think you could be impartial in this case? Give both sides a fair shake? Let the chips fall where they will? The case is a blank blackboard and we'll fill it up with evidence. Do you think you could make a decision based on that evidence, and not on anything else? Are you a fair person?"

"Yes."

"Great! Ms. Surgeon, do you think you could be impartial in this case? Give both sides a fair shake? Let the chips fall where they will? The case is a blank blackboard and we'll fill it up with evidence. Do you think you could make a decision based on that evidence, and not on anything else? Are you a fair person?"

"I'm sorry, what? I didn't hear you the first seventeen times you said that."

Actually, there was one woman who, when asked if she could serve fairly on the jury, said, "I could, but I don't want to." And then I overheard her muttering something about having to answer to Jesus and what if she didn't agree with the laws?

1:00-2:00 Lunch

I was the obnoxious white vegetarian at Subway over lunch. I ordered a veggie patty sandwich and they were much faster than I thought they'd be, so the patty was in the microwave before I saw them do it. So they kept fixing the sandwich without the patty. And I kept reminding them that this was a veggie patty sandwich, not just a veggie sandwich. I must have said "veggie patty" fourteen times. (And it's not a pretty thing to say.) In hindsight, I was kind of a bitch. I didn't mean to be, but I was.

(I'm sorry, Subway!)

2:00-4:30 Jury Room

They didn't like me enough to empanel me on that personal injury case -- even though the law firm I work with doesn't do personal injury work. (I thought about telling them that the defendants' attorney looked like an exboyfriend of mine, but he wasn't cute enough to sway my feelings one way or the other, so I let it slide). Maybe it was because I explained to them what a technical trainer does -- "I teach lawyers how to use their computers."

So I wasn't unhappy being sent back to the jury room. I checked my email, read my book, and actually watched a movie (since I brought my computer with me).

It was, however, kind of cool at the end of the day, when they read the names of jurors who were being dismissed. It's a long list before you get to "Surgeon," so I got to hear the melting pot of names called, one after another. Caitlin MacBride was right next to Jeanine Moskovitz, who were just behind a series of different Lees and Lis.

Would I do it again? Not for eight years. Was I happy to do it? You bet. I'm so civic it hurts.