Your rep is toast...

Wooo! Had a great holiday with some of my favorite people! Mike and Joe and Liz, natch, and Rebecca and John, and two of my brothers Joe and Frank. (Al is in Holland with his family celebrating his in-laws' anniversary.)

Showed Frank how to use my laptop. At 67 he's going to take an introductory computer course, so I wanted to give him a leg up.

We spent time wooing the cats, of course, especially Yoda, who took the admiring stares and petting with his usual queenly grace.

Frank brought me this really cute book by John Grisham. (Whoa--did I just put the words *cute* and *Grisham* in the same sentence?) But it is-- really. It's about C'mas actually, so how can it not be? And I'm going to read it just as soon as I satisfy my Aubrey-Maturin fix with #3 "The Mauritius Command."

While we waited for the others to show up, Bro Joe and Liz and I made candy with a kit Liz gave me at C'mas. I thought's we'd just be dipping fruit in the melted chocolate and vanilla candy, but Joe of course wanted to stretch things so he started making stacks and sandwiches of fruit, then we painted faces on some strawberries. It was fun and brought back memories of dye-ing eggs as kids and some of the bizarre experiments we tried (e.g. mixing all the colors together). Joe said he was in an elevator recently that was painted that exact color.

I had found this Bach guitar-recorder duet book on-line and gave Bro Joe a copy. He's going to look it over, and maybe we can play some together. That would be awesome.

But back to the festivities: in toasts of a nice white merlot that Bro Joe brought, we remembered those not with us. I thought of Kathy and Charles in Chicago, Sally and Tom, Ian (being currently wooed by the submarine corps) and his Emily, Dave and all his children and their sweeties, and Mike Taylor. Bless 'em all!

Dinner was pretty good. I overcooked the asparagus as usual, but the ham was nice--all clove-y and brown-sugary.

Dessert was a cheesecake with optional strawberries and a falling-apart chocolate cake (falling-apart because the layers would not come out of the g-d-mn pans.) There was fruit salad too, but nobody touched it.

After dinner, we played a game called Las Vegas Showdown (?) that John brought. (It was out of print, but he bought it on e-Bay) It was fun and exciting with appeal for all my sensibilities: strategizing to maximize profits, but also choosing and arranging the rooms in my casino and hotel for accessibility and variety like an interior decorator. Oddly enough there were no snide asides about mafia connections. With Joe E. and John tied at the end; Joe won the tie-breaker by having the most money. (So what else is new?)

Now we have the choice of eating healthily or decadently for the rest of the week. On the one side: ham, rice, cake, candy, sweet bread, and more cake. On the other, tropical fruit salad, strawberries, greens, and asparagus soup. Maybe we'll alternate.

Mike did voluteer to take the rest of the cheesecake in to work--noble of him.

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