Making the Most of Our Christmas Bounty

Not to encourage all of the consumer madness of the holidays, but we sure scored on some great Christmas gifts. In fact, we're still wallowing in the glow of our Christmas bounty, and they're sure to bring us hours of domestic bliss. The kind we love.

The kids got a couple of really cool books from their grandparents, and needless to say, they have not only sparked their curiosity, but keep them coming back for more. The latter part is not an easy thing to do because A&N will often read a book once and be done with it. It makes going to the library an endurance sport, but we're glad they love reading. Either way, they got the David Macaulay books on how things work, and they have been reading them like crazy, every day. I think by the end, A will be ready to apply to medical school.

I get to use my stellar coffee cup that was made for me in pottery class. It's a pretty amazing piece of work. If you can't tell from the pic, that's a leopard on the front standing in front of a palm tree, and its tail curves around to form the handle. How can you not love such attention to detail? Best of all, I get to use it every day in the morning, and as you might have guessed, my coffee tastes that much more delicious since I started using it. Amazing how that works.

We've also broken in our pizza stone, and the thing is amazing. Thanks to DR for that one. I'm still not completely sure how to clean the thing, so I'm employing my standard approach to these situations by simply not cleaning it. How's that for a solution? Actually, because it gets baked at high temps, it tends to get crusty and the stuff just falls off. You gotta love that sort of convenience. Best of all, we get crispy crusts on our pizza, and several bread recipes call for a stone, so we get brick oven results in the comfort of our home. We'd still like to build a cobb oven, and I think that's in our future.

And, of course, there's our sewing machine, but for anyone who has ever used one, you know that nothing more needs to be said.

Until the next time, thanks for reading.