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So far this morning I have made a batch of my uncle's ingenious cooked-egg-nog, which I can safely keep in the fridge until doomsday, and further plans include christmas shopping with my mom, going to see The Golden Compass, and making latkes. Woo!

Tomorrow I am hoping to venture out cross-country skiing with my parents, provided I can find skis in their garage (or rent a pair) and the weather is not too vicious. There is a glorious amount of snow outside and I plan to take full advantage of it this year!!

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The Golden Compass was pretty awesome, quite faithful to the book in letter and spirit, despite the careful footwork around the whole question of the church. I have to say that the wingnuts who are up in arms about this movie are making themselves look really, REALLY bad by pointing out that they're the ones the Magisterium is supposed to represent. Way to go, guys...most of the target audience probably wouldn't have put that together without your help. And the fact that a film about shrugging off the shackles of would-be mind-controlling authority has to censor itself in order to tiptoe around certain authorities really only underscores the point.

I was particularly impressed with the way they captured the spookiness of the North, the foreignness of Lyra's world, and particularly the sinisterness of the Magisterium. In the book the General Oblation Board is a bunch of zealots in the ranks of a fairly standard world-power type of organization, but in the movie they're much more monolithic, and much scarier. There's so much communicated about them in the opening scenes - unspoken politics are flying in furtive or pointed glances. And Nicole Kidman is, as predicted, letter-perfect as Mrs. Coulter.

TOTALLY looking forward to the next one.

And now, for latkes!

Among the chief reasons to buy a house soonish

I hate my teeny tiny oven. HATE. It may be new and shiny but it is teeny fucking tiny. I have exactly two cookie trays that will fit on its teeny tiny racks. And because these teeny tiny trays take up almost all the room on the teeny tiny racks, there is no air circulation between the racks, such that you can really only have one cookie sheet in there at a time anyway, because the stuff on the top will barely even cook.

AUGH.

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Tomorrow I must make applesauce and do glass. And possibly bake cookies, since the whole point of starting this marathon in November was to avoid having to bake every freaking day in December until christmas. One of these years I will manage it.

The count is now 17 dozen, plus some hard-to-quantify nibblies, a large main dish, and the spiked eggnog. RAHR.