we went home for a nice, long week – nine days of visiting friends and family and doing a whole lot of nothing.
THINGS I ATE ON CHRISTMAS VACATION:
1. paella 
spanish chorizo, some other spanish sausage, rice, and big-ass shrimp.
2. the luther breakfast. i invented it. and then ate it more than once. (duke’s bakery glazed donuts, split open like a bagel and turned into a bacon sandwich. cheap, greasy, salty bacon. fuck. yes.)
3. vinarterta
icelandic christmas cake. i’ve been meaning to make it since i first got the recipe… when i was 19. 7 layers of a torte made with cardamom, vanilla sugar and cream, with a prune filling and vanilla-sugar glaze. kind of like a really awesome fig newton, and easy to make. would have been even easier if i owned more than one 9-inch cake pan!
4. CheeseSteak’s Mom’s New Year’s Dinner
this was so good we made it again this week when we got home. fill a crock pot with sauerkraut, throw in an onion, brown sugar, and a roast. bonus: farting contest. unlike a poo-slinging contest, EVERYBODY wins a farting contest.
5. christmas lump cake
kind looks like a christmas poo, doesn’t it? it’s a pile of fruit. you bake a walnut spice cake, break it into a mess, and throw that mess on top of the pile of fruit. then you cover it with cool whip. it sometimes lasts more than a day. usually not.
6. peanut butter pie
this is another win from CheeseSteak’s mom… peanut butter. cream cheese. cool whip. blender. graham cracker crust. done. doesn’t last long enough to take pictures. which brings me to my next list…
FOODS FOR WHICH CHEESESTEAK AND I WILL FIGHT EACH OTHER TO THE DEATH:
1. peanut butter pie
2. pecan pie
my mom has started making two to avoid holiday bloodshed.
3. pulled pork
PositiveRoleModel actually likes pulled pork more than i do, so it’s mostly out of principle that i stab CheeseSteak with my fork for approaching the tub of leftovers. also, he winds up exhausted later when it’s time to fight over the last piece of pie. strategery!
BOOKS I READ OVER CHRISTMAS BREAK:
1. Super Freakonomics, two dudes named steve
2. Lit, Mary Karr
3. Eating the Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman
4. The Ultimate Guide to Weight Training for Fencing – i didn’t have high expectations, but it definitely exceeded them. surprisingly helpful for a book from a series of “weight training for (insert any sport we can reasonably expect people to spend $15 on a book for here)” books.
5. The Maytrees, Annie Dillard
MUSIC I DISCOVERED OVER CHRISTMAS BREAK:
1. Otis Taylor
blues the way it ought to be.
2. Ghosts and Vodka
they’re not famous. but if they were, it would be for their lyric “i want to salt your poop and wear it on my face like a beard.”
GAMES WE PLAYED OVER CHRISTMAS BREAK:
1. cirkis – it might seem like nothing more than a rip-off of blokus, but it’s really pretty awesome. then again, since blokus, blokus duo, blokus trigon, and blokus 3D are all awesome, that’s probably only to be expected.
2. Halo Wars Risk – i know. i KNOW!!! i realize i’m a gutter whore of consumerism for buying a themed variation of a game i already own. hell, i already own Lord of the Rings Risk, too!
and there’s a reason that LOTR risk is now a collector’s item that sells for $150-$200. because it’s AWESOME. the game designers really put a lot of thought into the new rules, and it really plays like a good tabletop roleplaying game – a party of adventurers is actually trying to move the ring from the shire to mount doom as the war rages around them – while still preserving the essential elements of classic risk.
the Halo Wars edition is similarly awesome. it plays like a totally different game than the LOTR version. the game pieces are cool. i stacked a couple of coupons and got it for $20 instead of $50. and most importantly, i wiped the floor with my competitors like the sexy goddess of war that i am.
3. tiddledy winks. not tiddly. TIDDLEDY. you’ve been getting that wrong your whole life, haven’t you? i hope you feel stupid!
REALLY fun. SpazMonkey is strangely skilled at it.
4. super scrabble
i won. that pretty much covers that one!
5. khet
