That’s the song I have stuck in my head right now. I got Jeremie’s sister Adena the new/double re-release of Mike Doughty’s Skittish/Rockity Roll for Chanukkah and we listened to it in the car on the way to lunch. When I got it for her I picked one up for myself as well and I highly recommend you get one for yourself if you have the means. It is double plus good.

Oy, people. Can you believe this tsunami business? Please be generous and pull out your checkbooks and credit cards and make a donation to the aid organization of your choice. If the thought of helping people doesn’t get you going, think tax credit. Amazon has an easy way to make payments to the Red Cross but you can also do so through the Red Cross website. If you have employer matching on charitable donations, don’t forget to fill out the necessary paperwork!

Sleep well.

27,656 2004 Elite Qualifying Miles

My miles from EWR-CDG posted today, so as of tomorrow I am Silver Elite on Northwest for the next year. Hot.

I am crazy thirsty today. I definitely haven’t been drinking enough. I usually knock back 2.5-3 liters of water while I’m at work and I bet I haven’t had even 3 liters of water over the past 3 days. I should pay more attention to that.

Not much going on right now. Hanging out at Jeremie’s house before we go back to Ruthellen’s house for shiva. Jeremie’s Mom and Dad went over there around 2 but the idea of 7+ hours of sitting shiva was a little too much for the rest of us. It was nice, though, as nice as a shiva can be.
I am sleepy. Elias and Adena are watching Frontier House but I need to try and do some work. Cows on tv.

I am in a good mood today. That is all.

Tuesday afternoon I ordered snowshoes from REI! We don’t have any snow on the ground here yet, but I figure it’s only a matter of time. I’m somewhat conflicted on the matter because I hate shoveling snow and driving in snow but I am looking forward to snowshoeing. There are lots of good places around here to do it. We have a nice public golf course a few blocks from the house and then there are several nature preserves in the area as well as various estate/museum type places in Westchester County. Should be a good time.

It’s kind of a wierd time at work right now. We only have 1 day left to make changes to our system until the first week of January. I have a big section of code to check in before tomorrow morning but I am waiting on someone else to complete his portion of things so that we can join our stuff together and test it. If he doesn’t get it done soon we won’t be able to check this stuff in and then there will be wrath. Not from me (because truly, I think this stuff should undergo a lot more testing) but the Product Developer and sales people will be Angry. Capital A type angry.

Eh.

I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird to keep track of all my non-work/non-pine email, RSS feeds and work newsgroups. I really like it. Instead of never checking my various webmails I have everything centralized. I think it had been two months since I last checked my orangeparade.com email and my inbox was totally full. Of course it was all poker this and viagra that. Die, spammers. DELETED.

Hello, hello! Having a lovely time in Belgium. Our flight here on Air France was very nice, even though we were in coach. The plane was a bit nicer than Northwest planes usually are and the food was surprisingly good. We even had smoked salmon as a first course! We were a little nervous because we were forced to check our luggage and it usually takes a long time to get luggage at CDG but our suitcase was the 4th off the plane and we made our train with time to spare.

Yesterday we spent most of the day walking around Antwerp with Jeremie’s Oma and his Aunt Sarah. Antwerp is smaller than Brussels but the city center is quite similar.

Ok, enough of me trying to figure out how to type querty-style on this European keyboard. Bonne nuit!

I just found this pattern for really tall socks on Knitty and now I want to make them really badly. I have too many knitting projects in progress. Sad face.

Oh – Happy Hanukkah to those of you that are celebrating. Light the first candle tonight. I’ll be singing the “Light the Menorah” song (my Mom made it up, but it’s a goodie).

I moved into my new office this morning and now I have a perfect view of our first snowfall of the season. The snow is coming down in huge clumps and it almost looks like feathers from a pillow fight. I wish I had my camera.

We had the oven on for almost 7 hours today. I can’t remember doing that, like ever.

Ben and Mandy came over this afternoon to bake cookies because they don’t have a mixer and it’s more fun to bake with people. We made two kinds, both recipes from the Food Network. The first dough we made was for Alton Brown’s “The Chewy” chocolate chip cookies. Now, when I think of chewy chocolate chip cookies, I think of slightly puffy and thick chewy cookies. This recipe required that the butter be melted, which should have been my first red flag but as I trust in Alton, I overlooked this peculiarity. Since we needed to chill the dough for an hour before baking, we went on to the second type of cookie, Raspberry Lemon Thumbprint Cookies from Emeril Lagasse.
I’ll tell you the truth. I really wanted these cookies to be horrible, because I’m not a fan of the Emeril, but these were fantastic jammy morsels. Ben and Mandy made this dough while I cleaned up a bit and sat on the couch for awhile. I helped a little at the end by filling the jammy hole with jam, but that’s the extent of my involvement with these ones. They did seem to be fairly easy and quick to throw together but require some ingredients you may not usually have around the house. Though the recipe calls for Chambourd or Kirsh, Ben and Mandy brought along a delightful framboise liqueur and a little of it went into the jammy mixture and lots more went in to us. I remembered that I had a bottle of framboise from our visit to Chamonix in October 2002 so I brought it up from the cellar and we had a little tasting. All in the name of science. Both were very good but different from each other.
Anyways, the thumbprint cookies baked up wonderfully and tasted even better once they’d cooled. The only thing to note is that the recipe says you’ll get 4 dozen cookies and we got about 20 cookies total. I think that we could’ve stretched the dough a bit farther but there’s no way we’d come close to getting 4 dozen.
Back to The Chewy. After hanging out in the fridge for an hour, the dough had firmed up nicely and we had high hopes of perfect chocolate chip cookies coming our way. This was not to be the case. The cookies spread a lot in the oven and came out quite flat and much more greasy than I usually care for. But here’s the thing – they do taste good and even though they’re quite possibly the thinnest chocolate chip cookies to come out of my oven, they are indeed chewy. In my opinion, they’re not pretty enough to serve to company and I wouldn’t make them again. They’re just not what I’m looking for in a choco chip but they are interesting. I think I’ll try Alton’s recipe for “The Puffy” and see how that comes out.

You thought I was done? Ha! Then we made homemade pizza. But now I’m too tired to tell you more about it. Perhaps tomorrow.

Well, I’m not getting the office I thought I was going to get. No big window for me, just a little window. My new office is small but bigger than my cube and quieter than my cube so that’s something. And instead of sitting next to my management chain, I’ll be sitting between a friend and a stranger. Paperwork has been filed so I think this one’s for real.