Dec. 28th, 2012 is my Dad’s 92nd birthday. We didn’t do anything particularly special in his honor, but I remembered him a lot.
Alvin P. Shapiro, about 1993
In the morning, I worked on the two online courses that I’ll be teaching in the spring semester – classes don’t start until Jan. 22, but I have to have my syllabi to the departmental library by Jan. 7 if I expect them to build the online course reserves/readings list for me. I tried calling my brother for dad’s b-day, but they were getting ready to head to the Washington coast for a holiday getaway, and so ignoring phone calls. I shoveled snow, then took the bus downtown. I wanted to shop for the new Peter Buck solo LP, that’s vinyl only – Mark’s & my major gift to each other was a new sound system that includes a USB turntable, so I can listen to LP records again – and rip them to play on my iPod. And I wanted to mail my property tax bill from a real post office. The almost last remaining downtown record store didn’t have the LP, but I ran into some friends in the museum gift shop and got up to date emails for them, plus I had a nice walk. I stopped at Trader Schmoes for milk, and the small near westside record store (where Mark’s son works) did have the LP – they said it was the last one, and they doubted they’d get anymore. So not only did I get it, I had less far to carry it.
John & Al & I had our belated exchange of Christmas gifts – although both Al (Dad’s namesake) & I still had a bunch of stuff to be delivered by Amazon, that we just described to each other. John & Al call my Dad Opa. John stuck around for dinner – leftover butternut squash lasagna and garlic toast in front of Game of Thrones (HBO is re-running season 2 to get us all pimped up for season 3, tho we still have to wait til the end of March). Not sure Opa would’ve liked the lasagna all that much; he’dve probably preferred a more traditional tomato version. I think he’d have liked the garlic toast, though. We had leftover cookies for dessert. I’m trying – I am tapering my cookie consumption, only 3 cookies all day yesterday; 2 of the pine nut macaroons to give me strength to go downtown after shoveling, and 1 of the rainbow cookies after dinner. Tomorrow all the leftover cookies go to the homeless. I didn’t break out the Moravian ginger thins, Opa’s favorite, for dessert – even though I have a lot of them – see below. They keep forever, so we can have Opa desserts – thin crispy cookies with canned fruit (or maybe I’ll poach some pears) well into the new year. It’s kind of a healthy, winter-time, dessert, anyhow.
Moravian ginger thins – made a huge batch this year, since they were the vegan choice at my cookie thing at Monona Public Library at the beginning of December.
