Yam, bam, thank-you ma-am...

I love the holidays!

Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Halloween, all those fun little holly days in between. Not for their religious value of course, not for the child-like intrinsic quality these holidays bring,
but because I
like
to
Feed
people.

And not just a meal either, not just a feast, not just a Gourmet feast, but something more like a Big-Yummy-Little-Old-Ukrainian-Grandmother-Style-Stuff-You-Til-You-Puke-And-Then-Make-You-Another-Plate-And-Complain-About-How-Skinny-You-Look Gourmet Feast.

I like to cook. lots.

So, I'm on the web this morning looking for side dishes to make, cuz wouldn't you know, I don't think that Turkey, Ham, Chorizo stuffing, mashed taters, broccoli and cauliflower bake, Red pepper salad, corn muffins, cinnamon buns, 2 kinds of pie, and homemade breadsticks and buns are going to be enough. Plus, I totally forgot about Yams! My poor little tubers! Now how could I do such a thing?

So I look up the fated tuber, and up pops all these icky sweet desserty thing to do with yams. Really? eww. candied yams? Saw a picture and it looked like upchucked peach slices. yuck. Baked in a pie? with marshmallows?
I remember a friend tried to do that once for a dinner I went to , but he was poor and didn't have marshmallows, but amazingly enough had marshmallow topping, and he wasn't really a good cook either, cuz the crust was burnt, and the eggs had separated from the yam mixture so there was hard baked egg bits in it, and he put the topping on after baking the pie, and cuz the pie was still hot the marshmallow topping started melting and it looked like somebody sneezed on the pie, but that's not the real reason I have a substantial fear of cooking with yams, nope...

Anyways, I thought that the sweet desserty thing was the sweet potatoes job. What? they're the same thing? No... really? You wouldn't believe how many recipes I found where the chef thought it was the same thing! you probably wouldn't even care!

Well I looked it up, cuz I was Really Confused. and No. For all you fantastic would-be chefs out there, The Sweet Potato, and the Yam are two completely different tubers.
Idiots.

So I spent the next hour or so reading up on why these two tubers are so different, how a yam is actually naturally sweeter than a sweet potato, and how yams are actually tropical, and can grow to be 7 feet tall (takes a backhoe to get it out of the damn ground), and all about the amazing health benefits of each tuber, (I Really like the word Tuber), and where the word Yam even comes from (for all you geeks, it's from the african term njam, nyami, or djambi, meaning "to eat,". who knew?)

and basically wasted my morning without finding a single recipe to cure my side dish blues.
well...

X-mas Closure

Ready?

Ok!!

All together Now!!!

IT'S ALMOST OVER!! IT'S ALMOST OVER!! IT'S ALMOST OHH-VHEE-EEE-ARE, OVER!!!

Thank you for your time.

My sleep calculator is broken!!!

So starts the daily ritual of being too tired to do anything more than sit drinking coffee and hoping against hope that the caffeine kicks in soon, even though I've noticed I've become immune to caffeine as of late, except for that annoying eye twitch that I figured out was just from too much caffeine. It's gone now, thanks to some muscle relaxants,well mostly anyway. I just feel too apathetic to really be annoyed at my eyeball right now.

I read in a magazine that during the x-mas season, men should be getting an extra hour of sleep a night for a total of 8-9 hours of sleep, and women should be getting an extra hour and a half to 2 hours for a total of 9-10 hours of sleep. This is supposed to help prevent against winter colds and other maladies.
I, however, fail to see the logic in the statement. Sure, extra sleep gives your body time to rejuvenate, slows everything down, and lets you work through the weird stuff that happened during the day. It lets your body fix it self, and gives your brain and sensory thingies a break.

BUT-how can one get an extra hour or two of sleep when there's so much to do during x-mas?

Lets tally the hours here:
1. the roads suck so bad that you have to get up an hour early to drive to a workplace that only takes 20 minutes to get to in the other seasons
-1 hour

2. you have to set the alarm for at least 20 minutes earlier anyways, cuz when it's still pitch black outside, it's harder for you to wake up.
-20 minutes, +35 minutes

3. The Tim Horton's/Starbucks/other local coffee drive-thrus are extra packed, cuz no one wants to actually spend the 5.2 seconds it would take to get out of the car, to the freezing cold, and run inside to get yummy warm coffee only to have to go back outside in the freezing cold for another 7.9 seconds(remember you're holding sweet caffeinated nectar you don't want to spill) just to get back to a semi-cold car, cuz you turned off the engine not realizing it's -26 before you went in. Hey, I get it, not all of us think before a certain percentage of coffee has been injected into our systems. I'm not even sure I'm there yet...
-10-12 minutes


4. The Malls are open later and later everyday, and you realize that the one gift you couldn't find has just been shipped in but won't be out on the shelf until 9:30 in the pm. Due to work shortages and picky pre-teens, This leaves you scrambling with a whole bunch of pissy people and their half-asleep kids still waiting for the same thing at around 10:30 pm, because the kid who was supposed to be unpacking the shipment quit to go work at a McDonald's so he could get the free meals.
-39.6 minutes, plus two bruises on your elbow that will hurt like a bitch in the morning.

5. You stay up baking cookies for x-mas prezzies for coworkers, only to realize that you've sampled the equal of two dozen cookies, and it's already 11 pm, and that new magazine you read, you know the one that had twenty fabulous ways to stuff a turkey cold, says that you shouldn't sleep on a stomach full of sugar for at least two-three hours because your body won't metabolize the sugars and fats while you're sleeping, and you know those two(or was it three?) dozen cookies are at least worth 12.6 pounds on the hip/thigh/ass/second chin scale, but you're so tired, so you try to compromise by doing lunges around your house for twenty minutes, then reward yourself with two more cookies, give up and pass out exhausted around 11:45 pm.
-20 minutes exhaustive exercise, -17minutes guilt trip and sugar rush, + 15 minutes past your last snooze alarm

So taking into account that I usually have a bedtime of 10:30-12 pm, depending on if I'm working double shift or not, and that with taking my kiddo to daycare every morning before I have to be at work by 8am, I'm usually up by 6, 6:30 if I'm lazy, that's a daily sleep intake of 5.5-7.5 hours of sleep a night.

So we add... hmm... no subtract .....*mumble, sigh, carry the four*.....

and we have a total of 118.6 minutes of lost sleep to add on to that already depleted amount of zzzz's. anymore lost sleep, and I swear I'm going to start having spirit visions, complete with my own spirit guide in shape of a platypus. either that or I'm going to sleep 19 hours straight whether I like it or not.
fun

Click Click Click goes the Camera! Smile Smile Smile Goes my Son! Tic tic tic goes my jawline, I'll be happy when this shit is done!!!!

It's Thursday! That means it's almost Friday! That means that in Five days my son and I get to go do the X-mas piccys that are distributed to random family members every year! That means that, if nothing goes wrong with getting our piccys this time, unlike every other year, that everyone should receive their X-mas piccys by New years! yay! almost on time for something for once! yippee.
Just a tip. Never do X-mas piccys at wal-mart, as they don't tend to employ the regular version of people. at least not here in Bellybutton. But, as I tend to be both a sucker for punishment and Lazy, I've faithfully gone to Wallyworld every year to get piccys done. I can remember now that I'm not intuitively blocking my memories as I so often do, the first year was fraught with retardation. We actually got someone Else's pictures before we got our pictures! And when we finally Did receive our piccys, they had decided to print us the cast-off ones and not the ones we'd asked for. that was fun.
Last year, I got a phone call about a week after the shoot, saying that something was wrong with the film(even though the pictures are taken digitally) and that our entire shoot would have to be re-done, though not in time for X-mas, or probably even V-day. I opted for a full refund, and I got a free disc with all of our pictures on it, even though it probably would have taken them about 5 minutes to re-print the pictures for us. I later learned that one of the girls that had done the shoot had had a Major hissy fit, and had deleted all the photos she was supposed to be printing out, and subsequently got fired for it. How we still got a full CD of the pictures after that is beyond me, but whatever.
This year's picture shoot has been rescheduled twice due to people leaving/quiting/getting the hell out of there before Wal-mart's Apocalypse, so we'll see what happens. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Frozen Bird on a stick!!

So tomorrow's the American Thanksgiving. which means bugger all to me.
Except for Football, which I'll probably watch a little of.
And seeing whether or not I can get my boss to pay me holiday pay. He does that sometimes, as he's a little old. I wouldn't put it past him.
The grocery down the road from me even has ham and little turkey's on sale, just for the occasion! (They're probably saving the Big turkeys for the real consumer holidays), and I also noticed that they have coupons for their frozen Birdy dinners, which again, just shows appreciation for the holiday and the people who celebrate it. Don't get me wrong, my town and at least a quarter of the Country I live in are considered hick-ish, but I know we didn't come up with that frozen dinner thing, even though we have enough snow around here to freeze our own meaty buns off with.
anyways, happy birdy and ball day!