Gum Drops

Hello all,

I hope all of you have had fabulous holidays. I was lucky enough to spend a couple of weeks with my family out west, and so took a little hiatus from writing. But, now I have some (hopefully) interesting things to share.

Not long before I headed home I found a recipe for homemade gum drops floating around my Google reader. Not only did they look delicious, but they looked incredibly easy too (i.e. no candy thermometer needed). Unfortunately they required things like flavorings, and since I don't have a huge variety of those I decided to wait till I went home to make them.

My recommendation would be to use more flavoring than you think you need because my flavors ended up being much more subtle than I'd hoped. Also, I actually managed to make something red, using food coloring (you can maybe see the difference between round 1--on the back right and round 2--on the back left). The candy went over well with my family, though I found that longer I let them sit out the more gum drop-y the consistency was.

I hope you all are gearing up for a fabulous New Year!

Relief Society Christmas Concert

Every year the Relief Societies in the Singles Wards in my stake band together and put on a Christmas concert. This was something like the tenth or twelfth annual concert this year. And it was pretty amazing. They had a variety of choir pieces, and also solo or small group songs. A girl from my ward who is a professional opera singer sang a beautiful rendition of Gesu Bambino, which I think was my favorite piece. I didn't sing in the choir, but I did contribute by making a pumpkin pie as part of the refreshments. It was an excellent concert. Maybe next year I'll step it up and participate a little more.

Holiday Pops

Last week I used my college card, to attend the Boston Pops holiday concert. It was fabulous. One kind of fun thing about the Pops is that they take out the rows of chairs and replace them with tables and chairs and then serve food throughout the concert. It is fun little dinner-theater kind of thing. I didn't order anything (it was a little overpriced for my college budget), but the couple sitting at the table in front of me shared their pitcher of raspberry lemonade with me. It was very kind of them, and very delicious. I had popped by Modern's Pastry before the show and bought a canoli and some amaretto cookies, so I had the canoli during intermission. It was so good. It's been ages since I've been to the North End. I kind of miss being there all the time. I think my favorite piece was "The 12 Days of Christmas." They did a version where each day was sung to the tune of some other popular song. It was very well arranged and fit together real nice. They also had a person who read Twas the Night Before Christmas, which they had put to music. I felt that this concert was a wonderful way to start out my Christmas season.  

Gift-giving

This year I really struggled to figure out what I wanted for Christmas. I started several months ago trying to compile some kind of "list" to make things easier for my family. But when it came time to really think about it I realized that there are really very few things that I need, and even fewer that other people can pick out for me (for whatever reason I find better success in picking out my own clothes). And some of the things that I was in need of I recently acquired from my Grandmother, i.e. a bread tin and mason jars.

I really hate having to make quick decisions about purchases. I always feel like I'm impulse buying, even if that's not really the case. I have a good story about my favorite dress that illustrates this well, but it will have to be a story for another day though. Because of this fear of impulse buying I'm a huge fan of the concept of putting something you want to buy on a list and then revisiting it a month or so later to see if you still want it. More often than not I find that I don't really need the thing I thought I needed. And so this means that as I was trying to figure out what I wanted for Christmas, that the things I thought I needed I really don't. And as I've tried to minimalize and declutter my life my wants have decreased quite a bit. For me I feel like this is great, but I think it frustrates those who may want to show their love for me through gift-giving this holiday season.

Compliments

I was just thinking about how I haven't written any interesting posts lately--because the last few weeks have been pretty run of the mill. And then I remembered the great compliment I got today while out shopping. My roommate and I had gone to Target to pick up some things we needed and we were checking out when the cashier leaned towards me kind of conspiratorially and asked me if "she" was my daughter.

Yeah. I didn't really know how to respond to that, other than to super awkwardly say no. No, my roommate (who by the way is older than me) is not my daughter. I wish I could make an excuse for the cashier like that his age would make it more likely that two we looked like a mother-daughter pair but he was about the same age as us too.  Yeah, I still don't know what to do with that information.

The Pops

Tomorrow I'm off to see the Boston Pops! The Holiday Pops, even. Yeah, I do love my College Card.

1 down, 2 to go

Today was the last session of my technology class. It is over! finally! And it was a pretty easy day. We each had to give a short (3 min) presentation of the websites we created. It was fun to see what everyone had done with their websites. And rambling about a website for 3 minutes is a cinch. I don't think a single person in class really prepared and everyone did just fine.

Now I just have two more days of school until I'm free for approximately a month. One thing I love about grad school: long Christmas vacations.

It all changes so fast

I think we are all agreed that the world is changing fast. Very fast. But, do  you ever think that maybe it's changing too fast? There are so many days where I feel like I just can't keep up. And the truth is, I don't want to. Why do we spend so much time and energy and money  fixing things that aren't broken and making things better that are good enough already? (and really, just making them worse than they were before, but covering it up with the fact that they look cooler). I spent a good chunk of the morning working on an assignment for my technology class. It's one I've been putting off all semester because when I did the first part of it earlier in the semester it made me want to take all my technological advances and throw them out the window. Which is a little how I feel today. Technology is great, mostly. But it just changes too quickly, and I don't want to keep up.