All through the holidays I kept having this feeling that this year, things were just different, somehow. I wasn’t as driven, maybe. I didn’t make cookies over when they didn’t come out right. I think I took less cookie-process pictures. I searched my blog archives, and started seeing similar posts from prior years, so I started feeling like, “why post?” Although sometimes the cookies really did come out different.
2012 Cinnamon almond stars:
Cinnamon stars
2013 – they’re flatter, and the meringue topping isn’t as white and opaque:
cinnamon stars
I definitely made smaller batches of some cookies, like X 3 or 4 instead of more. Although I did make A LOT of several kinds; I had lots of spoon cookies and jam stars – something like 180 spoon cookies, 235 jam cookies (it says here) and since they’re both sandwich cookies, it means I baked twice that number to pair up.
Jam cookies wait being stuck together with the jam – tops, right, bottoms left, more dough on windowsill
And just different can be kind of nice, too. This year for the first time I had help packing the cookies, after the party. Both Rachael and Toni helped me bag cookies, and that was really great. Not meaning to repeat myself, but there have been many, many times when I have thought I’d spend the rest of my entire life standing at the counter, or in the basement, or at the dining room table, stuffing cookies into ziploc bags.
John and Al were both here on Christmas – that was kind of different and nice. The last time all three of us were together on Christmas was 1994.
I’m not doing the supper club, that’s different, and winter dinners were kind of a thing.
2013 Sunday Supper banner
2012 One-dish diner banner
But I’m trying to get a new site going to announce smaller more exclusive dinners in my own house – so I can rent out the whole house where I had the supper club. Collecting a little more rent each month will make paying the mortgage a little easier.
Now that I’m back at work, it’s not all that different – it’s still a struggle to get classes ready on time. UW DoIT, in its wisdom, is taking the online courseware down from “10:00 PM on Wed. January 15 until 10:00 AM on Thurs. January 16. The system will be unavailable during that time. Please make a note of this outage period and plan your work accordingly.” Although it’s probably not all their fault – I am sure they are at the mercy of the software vendor to a certain extent.
Maybe it’s just winter in Wisconsin – freezes up the brain, causes depression and cabin fever. And this year, we’ve had such swings, from polar vortex to ice storm. On the news last night, the weather lady said that the temperature had fluctuated over 60º during the course of the week. Although, now that I try to recall, last year, when we went to ALA in Seattle, it was cold and snowy here, and 50 and rainy when we got back. Even though walking home Friday was really treacherous, I haven’t had to sop up water in the basement like last year. Guess that’s a mercy. Knock wood.
