17 December 2001
Last Friday, I was running late, and I'd decided on a whim to stop at McDonald's for orange juice and a hash brown for breakfast - and I was still the first person at the office.
This morning, I left home right on time and came straight to work, and three people had beat me in.
I feel positively tardy.
I finished the Christmas baking yesterday! YAY!
Tonight at the grocery store I need to buy a handful of little tupperware containers so that Tuesday I can pack them up and ship them out to assorted people.
Christmas cookies - they're good for what ails ya.
It was a fairly relaxed weekend. Friday evening we picked up Colleen and K.T. and went over to my parents' house. Somehow, Colleen had managed to know me for ten years, and yet never before have had a moon cookie. We introduced her to that joy.
Saturday I made shortbread - which turned out good on the very first attempt! (Luckily, I had ignored Martha's instructions to line the pan with paper again; I just greased the pan.) I even managed a couple of successful experiments - I divided the batch into thirds, and baked on third plain, one with an assortment of spices (cinnamon, cloves, and allspice, if you really want to know), and the final third with melted chocolate mixed in.
(The chocolate shortbread is, if you must know, particularly delectable.)
I did wind up having to make a second batch, so I could spread the dough thin enough to have enough to give people, but all in all, the shortbread was a success.
And then yesterday I did another batch of macaroons - divided into plain and chocolate.
So now I have peanut butter fudge, two flavors of macaroon, three flavors of shortbread, brandy snaps, and moon cookies. Five different treats - eight if you count the flavored batches of stuff. And I feel less like a dork than I did when it looked like I might have only two cookies to send out.
I started the third level of Diablo II yesterday.
I'm not sure I'm going to be able to finish this level. I died four times in three hours.
I'm okay with the fire-breathing giant toads. The poison-spitting river monsters are pretty cool as long as I remember to change my "special" attack to deal with them. The walking trees with their huge clubs aren't much of a problem. The enormous spiders (which thankfully aren't realistic enough to give me the heebie-jeebies, though the little ones that are just there are for "color" are pretty creepy) are tough, but not too bad.
Nope; what's killing me over and over and over again are the damn little pygmie guys who hop around too fast for me to click on and swarm me by the dozen. Ugly little pygmie-things with knives as big as their heads, that giggle when I kill them.
Four. Times. I don't think I'd been killed four times in the whole game before.
The thing with me and video games is that I never really manage to figure them out all the way. Every one, so far, has reached a point where I've gotten stuck and couldn't get past it. The only video game I've ever finished - ever - was Myth I. (Not Myst. I was so stumped by those stupid puzzles that I couldn't even get off the island.)
Though to be fair, I didn't get stumped by Baldur's Gate; I quit playing because my DVD-ROM drive was acting up. And I might take another stab at Myth II - my halting point there had nothing to do with my strategy or dexterity; I simply couldn't find the damn exit I was supposed to be finding.
This... This is why I play a lot of Minesweeper and Solitaire.
Word of the Day:
conglobate - to form into a round compact mass
Currently Playing:
Diablo II (stupid stupid pygmie-things!)