Cucumber on your salad, anyone?

As you may know, the wedding industry and its foibles are a regular source of amusement and/or amazement for me.  Today’s fun?  Lily just brought to my attention the fact that The Knot has its own Chinese wedding page. There’s nothing inherently ridiculous about that — anyone who’s had an Indian friend get married knows that wedding traditions vary hugely across cultures. However, I am LOVING some of the suggestions in their article “Top 10 Chinese Wedding Q&A.”

I have to think that this article was written by a white non-biologist, and here’s why.  Question number three is: Which traditional Chinese dishes will appeal to both our Chinese and Western guests’ tastes?  First, they suggest Peking Duck.  Fine, good.  Fatty, salty, a little sweet?  Who can argue with that?  Here’s the good part:

For your side salad, include sea cucumbers, thought to symbolize harmony and lack of conflict between newlyweds.

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Happy New Year, everyone!  I hope you all had a great time.  I know, it’s the 19th.  It is nothing like January 1 any more.  But frankly, on January 1 I still had holiday parties to go to and friends and family dancing in and out of town to deal with.  I like the concept of the new year resolution — but let’s be real.  Starting those resolutions AFTER the visitors are completely gone is a heck of a lot easier.

Now that life has settled into some semblance of normalcy, I’m prepared to tackle some of those items that I’ve been delaying.  They’re the same stuff that everyone has on their agendas at this time of year: save more money, eat healthier, waste less…  I’m an optimist, but I’m also realistic.  So, I’m going to tackle them one at a time.  Revolutionizing my entire life all at once is more than I can handle, so I’m planning on this resolution thing lasting me in sequence until March or so.

First up?  Finances.  I know, it’s a hugely major item.  I’m sure a series of posts will follow.  In the mean time, though, I hope all of your new year’s resolutions are going swimmingly — or, you know, at least make it to February!

This started off as a cake, I swear!

I’m sorry to say I killed a cake earlier this week.  And not only that, it was a birthday cake.  Being as the Man With The Hidden Talents is a fan of both coffee and chocolate, I decided that for his birthday I’d try the Mahogany Cake out of Rebecca Rather’s Pastry Queen cookbook.  (I have, by the way, yet to make a recipe out of this cookbook that I didn’t like.)

The problem was, well, me.  I was a trifle too impatient to actually wait for the cake to cool adequately before taking it out of the tube pan.  Unfortunately, hot cake = floppy cake.  Oops.  You can imagine what happened next.  So I made the glaze and drizzled it on top.  This was the result.  I actually considered making a second cake, but frankly, it looks pretty decadent like this, doesn’t it?  I let the boy help me glaze it (somehow the sloppiness of the cake made the whole process that much more fun), and we served it up with big spoons.  I might actually have to do this again sometime.  No, it’s not exactly fit for company, but could it possibly look this sinful if it was all in one piece?

Welcome to the Christmas season, everyone!  The giant plastic candy canes erected in the park outside my apartment on November 1 are now officially allowed to be there (I’ve been giving them the silent treatment), and I am opening the doors on not one but two advent calendars.  I love advent calendars.  Whee!  Anyone want to sing carols?

Of course, there’s the dark side of December, too.  This part of the year for me usually ends up being a mad scramble to buy gifts for my friends and family and get them crammed into boxes and shipped everywhere they need to go, while imagining that I am going to start making Christmas cookies and sending them to people at any  moment.  In an effort to help out folks like me whose shopping does not begin until December 1, today I thought I’d share my favorite places to shop for, well, stuff.  Stocking stuffers, quirky gifts, things for people for whom you’re afraid to buy a serious gift but have to get something…  you know what I’m talking about.  It’s easy enough to get on the internet and find what you’re looking for if you’re looking for something specific.  If you have no idea?  That’s a lot harder, particularly if you don’t want to spend a ton.  Here are some of my favorite sites to pick up interesting little gifts and inspire me to fill out the stockings.

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The time has come, the wind-up walrus said.  Talking about decluttering and organizing is all well and good, but it has nothing on actually doing it.  One of the most useful general tips I’ve seen was the suggestion that you pick one particular area at a time so as not to get overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task.  I’ve decided to start in the bedroom, and specifically to start with my closet.  I will admit, I’m starting here partly because I’ve done some work on the closet already and have a better feeling for what I need to do.  I’m also starting here because it’s one of the most pressing issues from the make-room-for-the-boy standpoint.  Winter is coming on, and he’s going to need to have space for some bulkier clothing.  Heaven forbid he should freeze to death because I have too many t-shirts.

In some ways, this is also a challenging place to start.  Closet decluttering can be a more emotionally fraught process than cleaning out the kitchen.  For most of us, there’s a certain amount of sentiment and personal image caught up in our clothing, present and past.  You’re clearly never going to get any use out of your high school prom dress ten years later, but throwing it away can feel like you’re leaving part of your life behind.  (I am not personally disturbed by the idea of high school fading into the past, largely unremembered and unregretted, but I know some people are.)  However, if you shop regularly, at some point you have to admit that you can’t possibly keep all that stuff without making your current life way more difficult than it needs to be.

Luckily for me, I am mostly embarrassed by the stuff that I used to think was wearable (ah, the pink glittery top of my dreams — there’s a reason that was on sale), but even so, there were some sentimental items I hated to trash.  I was also helped by the fact that most of my REALLY old clothes were at home with my parents until they moved, when my mother summarily threw it all away.  So much for sentiment.

I read a couple dozen articles about closet organization before I started.  Here are some of the more useful tips:

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Looking to increase your good cheer for Thanksgiving?  Permit me to recommend the Smashing Pumpkin Martini, made with home-infused spiced pumpkin vodka. Infusing the vodka requires a week, so you’re just in time to pull it together for your holiday celebrations. I’ve been coming back to this recipe in the fall for several years; it makes a deep-orange martini that smells shockingly like a pumpkin pie. If you can’t find vanilla or cinnamon vodka, no worries — cinnamon sticks work just fine and the vanilla beans already called for are in my opinion plenty of vanilla. I like to throw in a whole nutmeg and a few cloves to round things out, so feel free to adjust per your favorite pie spices. Enjoy!

That's right. It's a wedding cake.

Thanks to the Official Star Wars Blog (yes, this exists), some amusement for the fans on this gloomy Friday: the Tauntaun groom’s cake, complete with Luke Skywalker spilling out of the so-cozy warm entrails. The mind reels.

I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that you, gentle reader – like me, and like Kai – have too much stuff.

Once you’ve sorted and sifted, perhaps with the help of Kai’s Clutter Chronicles,  you’re probably left with a pile of things – clothes, books, toys, housewares, CDs – that you just don’t need or use anymore.   What do you do with it?

Don’t trash it just yet.  Besides the eco-green factor, there are plenty of non-profit organizations out there that can make great use of your unwanted, but still serviceable, possessions.  And for some of the stuff that’s broken or obsolete (like old iPods, cell phones and computer equipment), there are good ways to recycle it instead of dumping it your garbage can.  And, of course, let’s not forget that your charitable donations can help you reduce your tax bill!

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I'm going to get around to toilet training the cat soon, I swear...

My crusade against clutter begins!  Over the last few days, I’ve been reading organizational advice on the internet.  There is a LOT of it.  Some of it is helpful, some not so much.  (“There should be a place to put away every item.”  Gee, you think?)  I haven’t thrashed my way through all of it yet, but I’m realizing that I’m going to need some specialized solutions in addition to the general advice.

I own the same stuff that everyone owns.  Clothes, pots and pans, glassware, random Christmas gifts and stocking stuffers, CDs and DVDs, and so on.  I’m assuming that the same general advice that works for everyone will be just fine for dealing with this stuff.  Then there are my own special clutter issues that the general rules don’t necessarily address.  In the interests of dealing with everything effectively, I’m going to list them here:

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How do you say no to this face? A stuffed emperor tamarin.

Welcome to November!  The ramp up to the Christmas season has begun.  In support of my gift-giving efforts, I spent some time this weekend with the World Wildlife Fund’s gift catalog.  WWF has been one of my favorite nonprofits for many years — they do great work on wildlife conservation all over the world and make intelligent use of their money, which is more than you can say a lot of “environmental” groups. WWF’s conservation funds go where they’re most needed.

Although WWF has a whole slew of feel-good gifts, my favorite section by far is their animal adoption center.  For contributions of varying amounts, you can symbolically adopt one of 100 species of wild animals; for a contribution of $50 or more, you get a stuffed animal in addition to your adoption certificate and information about the animal.  I have for some years very much enjoyed this catalog because it is the source of some of the funniest stuffed animals I’ve ever seen.  Every year, I desperately want to “adopt” at least three or four just because the stuffed animals are so irresistible.  Are you passionately devoted to okapis?  You can finally get your own stuffed okapi and put money toward WWF’s efforts to preserve wildlife.

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