Drive to the back of the line, please!

So I took the little neck-roller thingie to work yesterday. And when I pulled it out of my knitting bag to work on my neck, it squeaked at me. Horrible, nasty rusty-tricycle-wheel squeaking, way more annoying than the minor ache at the nape of my neck. I decided that I would rather be sore, than deaf! And I decided that this will definitely [deaf-initely?] be my white elephant gift for the High Priest Christmas party next year.

Another reason I am proud of my kid: she was originally supposed to have birthday lunch and a movie with HerSushi, but HerSushi’s mother rearranged his schedule for him. She was then supposed to have dinner and a movie with him, and HerBoy called and wanted to take her out for her birthday [he got home earlier than expected from visiting AilingGrandma].

When I went to bed Tuesday night, she was figuring out how to make it win/win/win. She called me at work yesterday to say that *all* her best friends were going to dinner and a movie with her last night. So nobody got excluded. I have raised her not to break a date with a girlfriend to go out with a guy, and not to break a date with a guyfriend to go out with a boyfriend [that’s my own standard of behavior]. I am once more in awe of her resourcefulness.

I didn’t set the alarm last night. It was lovely to wake up shortly after sunrise, feeling rather more rested than usual. I let LittleBit sleep in. She wandered out around 10:00am, and we threw on our clothes, hit the bank for cash since I still haven’t found my check blanks and the driver’s license bureau does not take plastic, and moseyed back to find what?

Forty bajillion people standing in line, sitting in all the available chairs, lining the walls, and waiting for their number to be called. The bureau had been closed three days for Christmas, and everybody in North Texas with a sudden urge to drive legally had gotten there before us this morning. I had Firestarter with me, but I sat so long that I knitted up to where the gusset begins, and I’d left the instructions at home.

I made the most sublime lunch for myself, a recipe I found on epicurious.com, for striped bass with chestnuts and pomegranate vinaigrette. I substituted spinach for the Swiss chard, and I used cooking wines in place of the drinkable stuff, and I played with the seasonings a little, and I have more than half of the vinaigrette leftover. I am thinking of ramen noodles for lunch tomorrow, with all this good stuff stirred into them.

I don’t often cook with wine-like substances, and I haven’t had a glass of wine since I was baptized in 1975. An old friend served his mission in Germany, and he told me that the selection of pure, unfermented grape juices was astounding. I wish that here in the US we had more options than the Meyer grape juices [which I like]. But sometimes I feel a little rebellious, and I snag a bottle of cooking sherry and throw it into my stew, or I’ll gurgle some white cooking wine into my leek and potato soup. I understand all the scientific reasons why it is perfectly acceptable to cook with wine, even if one chooses not to drink it. It doesn’t stop me from feeling vaguely guilty anyway.

I made two gi-normous individual apple crisps from one softball-sized Granny Smith apple and am now eating one of them with a splash of milk on top. Yes, what I *want* is a dollop of crème fraîche, but this is better for me. Oh, and I threw in some dried cranberries, too. Today I am the queen of antioxidants!

LittleBit came home from lunch with HerBoy, who was in our suburb, recruiting for the Marine Corps. Says she, “Ewww, it smells like fish in here.”

“Yeah, isn’t it great?”

“No, makes me want to hurl!”

Me, deliberately mishearing her, “Well you already know how to knit. I can teach you how to purl.”

She was neither fooled, nor amused.

I am about ready to feed the dishwasher and scrub the stove. [I had a small Vesuvius when all the liquids for the vinaigrette hit that hot skillet.] I parboiled some ramen, minus its seasoning packet, and it is now steeping in the leftover vinaigrette. And I am still in the mood to cook.

I really needed a day to stay home and putter. We ended up not getting her license, as we were an hour short on her driving time. We will get behind the wheel at dark-thirty tomorrow morning, put in that hour so I can honestly enter it on the affidavit for teaching time, and we were given a line pass so we can just walk in when the doors open at 7:30, wave the pass at all the cranky people standing in line, and get the affidavit notarized and her license finalized. Then she will walk home, and I will hop in the car and drive like a crazy woman to make it to work in BigD by 8:30, as I have no more PT until 12:01am on New Years Day.

She got to drive me around on some errands today: HobbyLobby [which BittyBit until only recently called Hollylolly, but now it’s Hob.Bee.Lob.Bee.], Garden Ridge, and a Wally World that I don’t normally get to, which had one of the red Boye crochet hooks I’m collecting in a size that I didn’t have. So now we are home, and the apartment is still wonderfully redolent of my lunch [Mlle. Philistine says it reeks of fish. What does she know?] and we will shortly be meeting one of her buddies at his house to return his key. She was in charge of the cats while he and his family were out of town for Christmas.

And I will leave her there to load up the iPod that HerBoy gave her for Christmas, and I will go play with the Sisters of the Wool. While we were bopping around town, we listened to the Hairspray soundtrack.

Good times!