Got the fudge recipe up on the recipe page today. There are a ton of variations that I might post at a later date, though I've never tried them myself.

We had our successful office party yesterday. My gifts seemed successful and the gifts I received were good too. Food was great, we're still nibbling on it today. I'm sleepy from getting up at 4:15 a.m. to take my fellow to the airport for a whirlwind business trip to Florida. I did come home and catch a few more z's but I guess it wasn't enough. So, now I can't decide whether or not to go home and take a little power nap before heading out for groceries, or if I should fix myself a sweet cold coffee drink to pep up and forge ahead. As soon as I wrote that, I had to go make a coffee drink, so my fate is sealed. In case you were wondering, it's a "coffee drink" because it's half coffee, half half and half over ice, with enough sugar to make it almost sweet enough to be coffee ice cream. See, I'm not a diehard coffee drinker, but I can take advantage of it's "medicinal" properties if it's prepared right.

I don't think I've mentioned how much I love my new desk set up back at the home planet. I was cautiously optimistic at first, but it's working out great. A couple of weeks ago I replaced my old folding six foot, always cluttered table with a nice Dolce desk and hutch from Target. It's a dark red stained wood and looks kind of classy. I was concerned about it being much smaller than my previous set up, but that hasn't been a problem yet. I love the fact that it has a pull out keyboard tray so that even if I'm working on a project on the desk, my computer use/web surfing isn't impaired by desktop clutter. The addition of this desk also resulted in a revamp of the entire west wall of my sanctum sanctorum and a net clutter reduction one big black lawn and leaf bags of garbage and one shed bound Rubbermaid multi-gallon bin. There still more clutter reduction to come, but a huge difference has been made.

About this desk, Target has offered a whole Dolce series of stuff, more of which I would like to own. Unfortunately, they are no longer showing the stuff on their website, so I fear that the line may have met it's fate, to be carried by our Target friends no more. I would like to get the file cabinet, for all of my important files, or other cool stuff, to fill out the set, so I'll keep an eye out for it. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to find it on clearance! Insert Homer Simpson-like drooling sound here, I love Target clearance, or any clearance for that matter. One of my favorite online clearance shopping sites is the Crate & Barrel outlet store. They usually have some pretty good deals on nice stuff. I like especially for my under five dollar office gifts. Check it out sometime. I'm itching to check it out now.

Why is it that last week, Christmas was two weeks away, and this week, Christmas is now? We're having our office party tomorrow. Luckily I work at a pretty relaxed place, so I could leave early to come home and make my contribution for our practically daylong eating festival. I made the toffee that I've mentioned before and foolproof fudge. I'll get it up on the recipe page sooner or later, just too tired tonight.

I ran out to World Market, formerly Cost Plus (WMfCP) earlier this evening to get one more present for one of my co-workers. We each draw five names and exchange gifts. This may seem strange to some who work at larger corporations, but we are currently at fourteen staff. When I started, way back when, there were only five of us and we all exchanged gifts with one another. Now, at that point, there was a two dollar per gift limit, we've since moved it up to five dollars. It's a fun time and we have some really excellent shoppers on staff who ferret out the most fabulous gifts, this is not a crap exchange folks. Geez, what a tangent, I started out talking about (WMfCP) and all of the great stuff I found and now I'm all on about how we exchange gifts at the office. Yawn!

Anyway, I found some great stocking stuffers for Sweetie at (WMfCP) and the last gift for the exchange tomorrow, I got the last bottle of Penfolds Bin 389 - and excellent Australian Cabernet Shiraz blend that I find (WMfCP) has the best price on - $18.99 a bottle, now in general, this is more than I would normally spend on a wine, but for the holidays, or any even semi-special occasion, this wine is well worth it. You can tell I'm tired since that was the mother of all run-on sentences. Needless to say, I found lots of great stuff, and now I'm exhausted, though I have tons more to say. At least I've got material stocked up for tomorrow. ;-)

Busy, busy, busy this weekend. I was successful in selling the dragonfly, a little, green Geo Metro that was my former car. Big thanks to my main squeeze for all of his help and loving support. I'm sure it will make the young Eagle Scout a fine first car. I'm super duper happy to get that albatross from around my neck too.

I poured my first bars of soap yesterday. Don't really feel right saying that I made the soap since it's just melt and pour stuff that you add color and scent to. I didn't fool around with any lye or any of the other basic (pardon the pun) ingredients required to actually make soap from scratch. Unfortunately my little starter soap kit from Brambleberry didn't include the directions for embedding the little dolphin shaped soap into the larger rectangular bar of soap. So I just tried what I thought would work. However, the little dolphin melted and morphed into a blue blob in my clear glycerine soap bar. Oh well, everything else worked out OK and smelled nice too. They don't look either as fancy or as rustic as I would be happy with though. Hopefully more practice will fix this.

We also made our first batch of "gloog" aka Christmas Elixir aka our homemade version of Bailey's Irish Creme Liqueur. It turned out well. Hopefully you'll be able to eventually to see the recipe on my recipe page, right now Geocities is a little reluctant to let me post.

I wrapped, packaged and readied for shipping, all the presents for my parents. What a load off my mind it is to have that done. We brought our nice bushy tree in from outside in hopes of decorating it soon, not sure when though, because there's much more busy-ness ahead. Tomorrow night, we're off to the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar and I can't wait. This is a local Austin tradition with lots of talented artists selling their wares. I usually have no trouble finding something for myself there.

It looks like the comments feature at Snorland has folded, so no more comments for me. Not that I had received any, but hey, you never know. So now if any of my millions of fans have comments, you'll have to keep them to yourselves. OK, I suppose you I could put up a "contact me" link somewhere. Yippee, a chance to learn more html. You know, I learned html years ago, didn't use it and pretty much lost all of my skills until starting this crazy blog.

I'm thinking of switching over to Greymatter and paying for hosting at Greylogs. I know it costs money, but the plans seems reasonable, and I don't mind paying to get working features and stuff. I'll stick with things as they are for a while and see how motivated I am to change after the new year. The other thing that prompted me to look into changing my sitch is this little gem from the Geocities Terms of Service:

...your page may have been suspended for violation of our Terms of Service, if any of the following statements are true:
- Pulling files from your GeoCities account to a location outside of Yahoo! GeoCities, such as auction sites, message boards, and other web sites.
- Using GeoCities for the sole purpose of storing files.
- Nudity/pornography.
- Registering for multiple accounts.
- Using GeoCities for commercial purposes.
- Using GeoCities for hate/defamatory purposes.
- Using your GeoCities home page to redirect visitors to other sites.
- Improperly promoting your website via email, message boards, or instant message (i.e., spam).

Not that I'm doing any of these things, but I was thinking about it. And tell me that a large portion of those with Geocities pages aren't already violating the TOS! Just for the principal, I'd like to get out.

OK, enough ranting.

Last night I learned how to crochet a ripple pattern. I picked up the Leisure Arts booklet, Ripples for Baby (beginner's guide) at JoAnn Fabrics. It was surprisingly easy and I'm not much of a crocheter and have always found the patterns with all of those codes quite intimidating. Now I'm inspired to make a little afghan to donate to Project Linus.

Argh! Something's wrong with the comments feature. What a pain. At least it appears to be at Snorland and not my error. Now just a matter of waiting til it's fixed.

After having two tubes of beads spill all over everything last night, I started covering a glass ball with beaded netting. I did standard horizontal netting, not the vertical netting that was in last year's December issue of Bead and Button Magazine, but I'll try that next. They have a PDF file with the instructions, so it's worth the visit if you want to give this a try. It seems to work up pretty quickly which is nice if I want to make any for our office party in a week.

The current issue of Bead and Button has some articles about beaded crochet. I'm thinking I might give this a try. There's also a really good animated tutorial at BeadCrochet.com.

The Friday Five
1. If you were to go to a movie this weekend, which one would you pick? Probably "Oceans 11" However, if you haven't seen "Amelie," it was wonderful.
2. What movie would you like to rent this weekend? Maybe "Spy Kids."
3. What one TV show do you always try to watch? Felicity and The West Wing. A strangely odd combination, though it's interesting to note that they are both on at the same time. Coincidence? I think not.
4. If you (and your S.O.) were cool with it, what five celebrities (at the most) would it be 'ok' for you to have a fling with? John Cusack, George Clooney (he's matured nicely, didn't like him so much when he was younger), a young Sean Connery (that accent!), that's all I can come up with for the moment.
5. How do you plan to spend your weekend? Decorating, wrapping, maybe baking.

Following up to yesterday's bubble tea discussion and purchases, I couldn't hold off on trying the coconut jel. While it's not bad, it's not necessarily the right thing for jelly tea. It's cubed and in a sweet syrup, but it's a little more firm and fibrous than might be desirable for a jelly milk tea drink. I'll continue to post as I try the different items. I purchased pineapple jel, which I suspect may have the same downfall as the coconut. I also got Ai yu gel, which I saw recommended somewhere on the web for use in jelly milk tea. It has strangely few ingredients, something like: gelatin, sugar, water, flavor and preservatives, so I'm not sure what to expect when I open the can.

Thanks to the fine folks over at Saute Wednesday and their article on bubble tea, I ventured out into the world during my lunch hour today. After touring the web for recipes and finding local recommendations in the Austin Chronicle, I went first to the Hong Kong market to get bubble tea ingredients and then to Coco's Cafe for a taro root milk tea with pearls. Delish!

Check out these sites for recipes:
Bubble Tea Online
About.com Chinese Food

I also bought some coconut jelly to use instead of the prepared tapioca pearls. I've had jelly milk tea and I think this is what they used. What the heck, it will be a little adventure. Picked up some chopsticks and Pocky, an Asian candy... cookie? Pocky comes in a variety of styles/flavors, and consists of a cookie/cracker stick about the diameter of a drinking straw and is usually dipped in chocolate. I got "Men's Pocky." The package says, "Crispy pretzel dipped in dark chocolate for the type of person who enjoys the finer points in life." I guess women aren't the type of people that enjoy the finer points in life? You can learn more and order Pocky at JapaneseSnacks.com.

So, I watched the Martha Stewart holiday special last night. Like some others I've read, I also wish their had been more projects, however, I did enjoy the show despite the lack of projects. I especially liked the all white, pop-up "cards" depicting the different lands that were shown between segments. It was also a treat to see Dale Chihuly, the glass artist. If you ever get a chance to see the PBS piece "Chihuly Over Venice" I highly recommend it. It's an incredible documentary piece on Chihuly and his installation of huge, beautiful, glass chandeliers around the canals of Venice, Italy. In the meantime, check out his website which is amazing in and of itself. There are lots of photos of his work and even some QuickTime videos.

Geesh! I finally got the comments and archive features to work on this thing. I had to go to the most simple layout, and I know it isn't as pretty as it was, but that can be worked on down the road. Now if I can get the blog to show up on/as my index/home page, what a treat that would be!

Since Sunday night, I posted a pic over in my album of the pumpkin I carved for Halloween. I think it came out pretty cute.

In preparation for a cookie exchange I attended today, I started my holiday baking by making two batches of toffee. You can find the recipe on my recipe page. Despite the rain, the candy turned out well - my mother always told me not to make candy in wet weather because it won't get hard like it should. This stuff set up without issue, though if left uncovered, which is was for the afternoon prior to swapping cookies, it will start to get a little sticky.

Don't be deterred from making this because it calls for a candy thermometer. It really isn't that difficult. My best advice regarding the candy making process is to be conservative with the heat under your pot while cooking. Start out with it at medium low and when you notice that the temperature is no longer rising, turn it up a little, and keep stirring, until you get to the right temp. I also found that the right temp is between 275 and 300, so there is a window, rather than a specific point.

The latest issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine has some recipes in it for toffees (more the stretchy kind I think, not the Heath Bar kind that my recipe is for) and nut brittles. Some of them sound quite good, a few are on the website.

I also finally made the lotion bar today as a hostess gift. I did a variation on those listed at Get Crafty based on the ingredients that I had on hand. I combined two tablespoons of beeswax pellets, two tablespoons of cocoa butter and two tablespoons of Queen Helene cocoa butter oil moisturizer. I felt that I didn't need to use the vitamin E capsule since the Queen Helene oil contained vitamin E already. If you are going to make this recipe with another oil, and you certainly can use something else - almond oil would be nice, I would urge you to add the contents of a vitamin E capsule to take advantage of it's preservative qualities.

I just combined the three ingredients in a glass jar, microwaved for a minute, stirred, and microwaved for another few seconds until everything was melted. Be careful, the glass jar gets hot! I didn't feel the need to add any essential oils or fragrance oil since the cocoa butter made everything smell yummy and a little chocolatey. Once it's all melted, pour into molds and let set. I put them in the freezer to set, since I was running late and they firmed up in no time. They work great too, my hands stayed quite soft, even after I washed them, but they weren't sticky. These will make nice Christmas gifts, though you need to be sure to put a little note with them explaining that these are lotion bars so people don't try to use them like soap with water, etc...