So, what's on today's agenda? Make a grocery list, and if the list isn't too long, do the shopping. Voluntarily suspend my constitutional rights and go into a clinic for a drug test. My friend Jen might be in town today, in which case I'll probably meet her for lunch. Start straightening up the downstairs half of the house in anticipation of my grandparents coming for a visit. (Lucky for me, they're too old to climb stairs, so I can toss all the junk in the bedroom and close the door.) If I get really inspired, I should start re-arranging the junk in the guest bedroom so we can put a bed in it. (I know, I know - a bed in a bedroom. What crazy thing will we think of next?)
Aside from that, I think it'll be a pretty slow day.
I want a hard-boiled egg. Isn't that weird? Actually, I don't really want a hard-boiled egg; I want some devilled eggs. Maybe I'll get a half-dozen eggs when I'm at the store and make some. Matt hates eggs, so we don't usually keep them in the house unless I need them for a recipe. And really, the only recipes I have that demand real eggs instead of the fake eggs are meringue kisses - which require separate egg whites - and hard-boiled egg variants. So we don't get them very often. I don't miss them much, but once in a while, I crave them.
One semester when I was in college, my morning routine was to walk to the Marketplace for breakfast, and I always got the same thing: Two hard-boiled eggs and two bottles of Elliott's Amazing Fruit Juice. (You got up to $2.75 for breakfast on the meal plan, and eggs were 30 cents each, and the juice about a dollar a bottle. It was the best use of as much of the money as possible without getting something gross like Marketplace pancakes.) One bottle of juice went into my backpack and back to the fridge in my dorm room. The other bottle I drank with my eggs. I always ate the eggs the same way, too - I'd get a packet of Miracle Whip and a packet of relish from the condiments bar, peel the eggs and dump the yolks in the bowl they served the eggs in, mush in the Miracle Whip and relish, then scoop it back on the whites to eat it. Poor man's devilled eggs. Or student's, I guess.
But I can't remember what the classes were that got me up and out early enough for breakfast. Strange, the things we remember.
I think perhaps after Christmas I'm going to do some shopping. I usually avoid after-Christmas sales like the plague, but there are some things I want that it would be nice to get on sale. A new artificial tree, for one. The ones that are pre-wired with lights run from $150 - $200, so if I could find one on sale, I could probably get it for almost the same price as a plain tree before the sales. And I have declared that we are definitely buying a new tree for next year.
And I'd like an advent calendar for next year. I gave one to my mom some years ago that's a wooden jigsaw puzzle of a tree. It's adorable, and I wish I'd bought one for myself, but that was during the lean grad student days, and I simply didn't have an extra $20 to spend on myself.
About a week after I got laid off, I was shopping with Braz, and we stumbled across an advent calendar that was a series of ball-candles on a string, with a clever stand that held up the top candle. I almost bought it, but I was still smarting from the layoff, not sure when I'd be back to work, and it was $50. After it became clear that I'd have a job with the new year, I went back, but they'd already sold it.
When I was a kid, my mom used to buy those chocolate calendars from some group of fund-raisers at the school she works for. The German club, I think. I'm sure you've seen them - wall-hanging calendars, and every door you open reveals a picture and a chocolate shaped like the picture. The chocolate was nasty and waxy, but my brother and I didn't know any better. We looked forward to them every year.
Why yes, this time of year is one big nostalgia trip for me, why do you ask?
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