New Year�s Day at my house

Wow, it�s been a real family-type day. Sleeping late, napping in the afternoon, just hanging out. Breakfast was some left-over smoked salmon, lunch was a piece of pistachio baklava with vintage Darjeeling tea. What a life. My daughter was delivered to our door early afternoon, and around four I went to pick Son up at his friend�s place. They spent New Year�s Eve building a snow fort in the front yard, complete with tunnels, foxholes, and staging platforms. Very impressive.

Hubby cooked supper, refritos and nacho sauce from Moosewood. I made tortillas, thinking I�d try out the tortilla press the Eebs gave us several years ago and never used. There was a half-bag of masa harina in the cupboard which had been there for longer than I could remember, and it was useless. The dough I mixed up would not stay together, and crumbled when I tried to peel it off the plastic. So I tried all over again, this time with wheat flour, and the press simply didn�t flatten them enough. I�d squash the ball of dough in the press, then finish by rolling it on the kitchen table with a rolling pin. Then I cooked them in a lightly oiled, cast-iron frying pan, and they were pretty darn good.

We ate in the dining room with the good dishes by candlelight, opened a nice bottle of wine, and had a nice family meal. Who knows how many more of those we�ll have, what with the kids off and doing their own thing more and more. After clean up, three off us (the boy was exhausted, not having gotten to bed until 4 a.m.) watched Get Shorty with John Travolta, Gene Hackman, Danny deVito and Rene Russo from a DVD we just bought. It was pretty funny, if you don�t mind people getting killed by assholes. I don�t like watching any violence, personally, especially in a movie labelled a �hilarious comedy�, but what the hey, no one else seemed to mind.

During the supper preparation, Hubby was looking for different vegetables he could chop up to put in the tortillas, and let out a yelp as he reached into one of the crispers and sank his finger knuckle deep into something disgusting. There was a lemon which had gone completely moldy in there, I mean, totally. Blech! Then, when he was pouring a glass of grape juice for the boy, who doesn�t like wine, I shut the refrigerator door, totally unaware that he was doing something on the other side of it, and we had a glassful of spilled grape juice to clean up from under the microwave oven. There�s never a dull moment!

So that was my New Year�s Day. The picture of domesticity. Oh wait, we made love again this morning since the kids weren�t home and we had the house all to ourselves. That wasn�t so bad. Still domestic, though.

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