1123! 1123! 5! Eureka!

Watch this!

what'd YOU get?

Apples! Silver ones that hold sugar and cream!

So cute!!

and an apron, and nigella lawson cookbooks, and and and and a necklace and an LSAT book.

Post-Christmas

Ah, the glories of going home for the holidays... mom and dad, this is what happens when I come home for christmas. except you're at work.

and speaking of mom - she is doing much better, as I understand, and has, indeed, begun to lose handfuls of hair. My Christmas gift to her, fabulous hats from Headcovers.com are well timed.

I love the princess...

Princesses have made the New York Times magazine this week. Oh, how I wish I were 10 in this day and age! You know I always played princess... though I didn't need disney to tell me what sort of princess to be. I had my own princess names - Sapphire was one - and I'd play "locked in a garret escaping evil parents" and run around the neighborhood with my handmaid/guardian (Ambre). What's wrong with that? :)

oh the smell of saltmarsh in the morning...

Well here we are in Maine, in our little apt. with matt's parents and sister and a view of the salt marsh. ahhh...



Merry Christmas!

just an update

so mom is doing well, according to dad - walking around, occasionally without oxygen, feeding the birds, watching movies. so that's fun :)

Matt and I are planning christmas dinner, to be made when we go with matt's family up to maine (brrr!!) again this year. And I spent an inordinate amount of time tonight - with no small amount of injury to my person - trying out a new recipe for Butternut Squash Risotto which I HIGHLY recommend! Tasty!

mom update

well, they ran the blood test early (just for my mom, I guess!!) and it is, in fact, Wegener's Granulomatosis. But Mom should be going home today - yay! They started treatment on Saturday, which means mom had a chemotherapy treatment that is a slightly lower dosage than for cancer patients. (Cytoxan works on a lot of different diseases, turns out.) Downside - yes, mom will apparently lose her hair. So says the doctor.

Food and Wine Matcher

Thank you Nat Decants, for having an amazing wine site with the coolest thing ever - a Wine and Food Matcher. I will spend hours on this...

Christmas Dinner thoughts are brewing... game birds with sangiovese? Mille feuilles with sparkling Italian Asti Spumante?

Or more eclectic: what wine DOES pair with haggis?? (Answer: New World Cabernet Sauvignon, of course!) Sushi? How about a nice champagne blanc des blancs? Marshmellow sweet-potatoes (listed improbably under "vegetables")? Viogner.

your mom... no wait, my mom

I always knew my mom was one in a million... but she's also 1 in 30,000... 1 in 30,000 people to be diagnosed with a disease which is known to most doctors as the answer to trick questions on their medical school exams (no kidding!): Wegener's Granulomatosis.

She's been hospitalized since Tuesday and will stay there until confirmatory blood tests are run on Monday (apparently the blood test is so rare/complex, only one lab in Oklahoma does it, once a week).

I talked to her yesterday and knew she was feeling better when she started listing the types of flowers in the arrangement I sent her. (imagine: [labored breathing] "Your flowers are beautiful honey ..." "I'm glad you like them, mom, are you feeling better?" "... lillies ... irises ... [labored breathing] ... delphinium ... canterbury bells ... [labored breathing] ... some sunflowers ... and ... and some red things I can't see because ..." "because it's on the shelf?" "yeah, I can't see it. Oh and a pink rose.") (Those of you who know, know that in her emails my mom only tells me about her garden and what birds she saw that week.)

Anyway, she said she doesn't mind being at the hospital because people bring her food, she doesn't have to do dishes, and she gets to watch cartoons all day. And more people have come by to talk with her in the past two days than she's seen in the whole month.