An ode to January

Everywhere I go, people seem down on January. “It’s such a bummer of a month,” I've heard people say. Well, I declare that that’s kooky talk. I love January. Truly adore it. Here are just some of the reasons why…

1. Everything is new again and a fresh start seems truly possible. Out with the old and in with the organizing. My house never looked so good.
2. I love winter. Everything about it. The sparkle of the ice, the crunch of snow beneath my feet, the spectacular way everything smells. Cool and icy and fresh, so much better than the sickly overwhelming scents that bombard me in summer.
3. Oscar-readiness begins! Plus, the Golden Globes and SAG awards are on.
4. Delays and cancellations and the promise of maybe, just maybe, if we’re lucky, getting good and snowed-in.
5. Hot cocoa, blankets, and books.
6. Leftover Christmas candy.
7. Fresh new calendars and day planners.
8. When you take your Christmas tree down, it feels like your room doubles in size. It’s like found space. My living room looks huge during January.
9. I start getting all my tax documents in the mail which makes me start dreaming of what I might do with my refund check.
10. It’s quiet. After the decadence of the holidays, January is when it’s perfectly acceptable to spend the evening doing nothing, enjoying the calm of a still house. That feeling is precious as diamonds.

Holy cow, I made a roast!

And I intended the heck out of that pun.

So, I'm trying to conquer my fear of cooking with raw meat. I suppose the time has come. I'm doing this by committing to cooking some form of meat each month this year. My mom thinks I should do this once a week. Clearly she does not understand the depth of my psychosis.

January's project was roast beef. I'm not going it lie; it was quite a saga for me, beginning with choosing a hunk of meat out of a terrifying case filled with hundreds of hunks of meat, proceeding to breaking this hideous thing out of the plastic and maneuvering it into the roaster, and finally browning each side which involved flipping the hunk over. The horror.

Once it was in the oven, though, I was struck by the awesomeness of how little effort is involved in preparing something so tasty. All the anguish was mental, not physical. And it all turned out like this, which is a good thing:


And what a lovely lunch for a lazy Saturday. There just might be something to this cooking thing.


I'd like to work my way up to something sorta complicated, like boeuf bourguignon. We'll see.

Well, it's about time.

Looks like I won't have to switch to wretched AT&T after all. Finally!

Mine!

Many thanks to J for the lovely news.

Results

Well, we came in fourth, just one point behind third place. We plan to do better next week.

Also, the toasted cheese sandwich at The Windber Hotel is magnificent.

Trivia Night!

Last week, Amanda, Jess, Kevin, J, Jen T, and I went to the Windber Hotel for Trivia Night. We were already delighted enough to participate in the regular contest, but imagine our excitement when we found out it was the first night of a three-month tournament? With a face-off against the top four teams at the end? Yes, please!

Jess and I bounced up and down in our seats like little girls and poor Amanda lamented that her status as a Texas resident would keep her from participating. (Texas, messing up stuff again.) J and Jen T are not the trivia fiends that Jess and Kevin and I are, so we filled out our roster by adding Jen, Melis, and Brian, as well as Amanda and Jess' cousin Travis. Tonight is our first competition as Team Ramrod (Kevin named us--he's a fan of Super Troopers.) I shall keep you apprised of our exploits.

And this is just volume 1, you say?

A while ago I placed a hold on the Autobiography of Mark Twain at the library. Today, I finally got to pick it up, and let me just say, I was unprepared for the massive size of this sucker. (That's a 17-inch laptop sitting behind it.)


It's 800 pages, and I'm convinced they only pared it down that low by making the pages themselves huge. They're 6.5 by 10 inches. Only my Riverside Shakespeare can compete with this for sheer size. My arm got tired carrying it back from the library.


All of this would be of little concern but for the sticker on the spine:


Are they kidding? I know it's new and in high demand, but really, is this a joke? I haven't read that many pages in 2 weeks since grad school. And that was only because I had no job and I was walking into a three-hour discussion session each week during which it became painfully obvious if one didn't read the book. (There's no hiding behind the other students when there's only six of them.)

I will do my best, but alas I have one thing hampering me: the person who checked this book out before me was a heavy smoker, and must have lived with at least one other heavy smoker. No, make that a commune of heavy smokers. Perhaps in an actual cigarette factory. What I mean to say is this thing reeks. Every time I open a page I get hit with a waft of heinous stench. Mr. Twain will have to be witty indeed to justify the headaches I'm about to incur.

I trust he won't disappoint.

Happy New Year, in cookie dough

Image from the New York Times.