C. L. Norman

Two years ago, I discovered Straight No Chaser, an acapella group. I bought their two Christmas albums and I love them. The Christmas Can-Can has always made me smile. Comments I have heard from my co-workers and customers over the twenty years I’ve worked retail have made their way into this song. Listen to it and tell me you didn’t smile. At least once.

        

I’m still doing the holiday retail worker thing wherein I am so busy with work that I hardly have time for the little things like remembering my name, eating, or sleeping. So I thought I would put up this link to this video of a song that was shared with me last year and has since become a favorite around this house.

I hope you like it.

        

Yes, Walla Walla is a real place. Bugs Bunny didn’t just make it up. I’m here for a couple of days keeping an eye on my parent’s dog while they cruise the Caribbean. It’s just me and the dog and my imagination here. In a three-way fight, I think my imagination would win hands down.

This is Bear. He’s part poodle, part Cocker Spaniel and all bark. At all times of the day and night. Needless to say I haven’t been sleeping well. However, he has those puppy dog eyes that can’t be ignored so I don’t mind much. I think that he is a little ambitious to want to play with two toys at the same time. But it is way more doable than the four toys he had a half hour after this picture was taken.

Speaking of my imagination, these tracks were all over the driveway this morning. I’m told they are turkey tracks but I’m not sure. I’ve heard there are dragons around here and maybe these are the tracks of their young. What do you think?

While I am sharing random things with you, have you all seen this video? Watch it as it is totally geektastic!

        

I know, I know. This two-season-long show has been off air for nearly 10 years but what can I say? I love it. And so I’m going to talk about it.

I didn’t get to see the show when it aired live. I somehow missed that it was on though I had heard about a series that James Cameron was going to do on TV and it sounded interesting. I just never heard that it started airing. A few years ago, I browsed through the TV Show DVDs at the store and stumbled across Dark Angel Season 1. I bought it, took it home, and popped into my DVD player. After all what could go wrong with a TV show about ‘genetically-enhanced children in post-apocalyptic Pacific Northwest’?

I fell in love and immediately started searching the TV guides for the air dates for current episodes. That was when I found out that this lovely, funny show had been cancelled after just two seasons. <sigh> I returned to the store and bought the second season. When I finished watching it, I was bummed. It does not end in a great place and as anyone who has been reading this blog for very long knows, endings mean a lot to me.

A while later I discovered that there were Dark Angel books and that they even tied things up. Finished the story even and I became very excited. But I couldn’t find copies of them anywhere. Finally last month, it dawned on me to look through the Nook library for e-book versions of them. Eureka! I immediately added all three to my nook wish list and last payday bought the first one.

Yesterday, I finished it. Dark Angel: Before the Dawn covers the timeline between when Max escaped from Manticore and up to the first scene in the first episode. It filled in a lot of backstory for all the characters and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Today is payday and I’ll be purchasing the next one in the series as soon as the money hits the bank.

One of my favorite things about the show is Michael Weatherly. His character, Logan Cale AKA Eyes Only, is a man with a cause and yet sense of humor. When life puts him down (paralyzing him in episode one), he doesn’t give up. He keeps going. He shines a light into Max’s life and she uses her uber-rogue skills to help him with his cause. The series is full of light and dark, weaving a rich and detailed glimpse into this world.

If you haven’t seen this series, you should. If you have, did you love it? Did you read the books and did they help satisfy the need for an ending?

I’ll be back in two books to let you know what I think of them.

        

Growing up, there was one Christmas tradition that I both looked forward to and dreaded. That tradition was baking day. On that day my mother would round up all of us girls and send us to the kitchen for the day. Armed with a list of cookie recipes written out in my mother’s very neat handwriting; large amounts of flour, milk, eggs, and chocolate chips; and the Cooky Book; we set out to bake a literal mountain of cookies.

Snickerdoodles, chocolate chip, and sugar cookies always made the list. And were we to make just one batch? Heck no! We had to double, sometimes triple, every recipe we made up. Hours and hours later, we (and the kitchen) would be covered in flour, sticky with sugar, and have platter after platter full of cookies. The surfaces of multiple pieces of furniture groaned under the weight of all the cookies baked on that day. (Oddly enough this was way before my mother picked up the hobby of collecting cookie jars. I wonder if this yearly event led to it.)

I loved this tradition because it brought the family together and of course, there were cookies. I don’t like to brag but I do have a fairly large sweet-tooth. It was something we did every year. It lent a “sameness” to the season that was comforting and tied one Christmas to another.

I dreaded this tradition because after the first hour, my sisters and I got on each others nerves and sniped at each other. We (or at least I) got very tired of filling up tray after tray with cookies to go in the oven. The dough sticking to my fingers drove me crazy. I don’t know if I am not a fan of baking because of this or if it was always a part of my personality. All I know is that I wanted out of the kitchen and to get back to my book or my Barbies.

I will occasionally bake one thing or one batch of cookies (and by occasionally I mean about twice a year). I enjoy the fruits of my labor. Immensely. I also feel bad that I don’t bake with my kids more often.

Maybe this year I will start the tradition anew. After all, I can now send my kids in to bake and sit back and watch the flour fly from the comfort of my chair.