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For goodness’ sake, I’ve started knitting again. I really need to pick a hobby and go with it, you know? One week, I’m all into learning Spanish in my spare time (which is practically nonexistent as it is). The next, I can’t find enough time to work on my self-education for my Leader accreditation. Then, I decide that I want to knit a scarf for Tim.

What’s going on?

Keep in mind, that my “free time” (read: times that Tim is home and in charge of the boy) is already divided up by exercise, going to the bathroom in peace, reading, working on actual paying work and the list goes on and on.

One of these days, I’ll quit being a hobby flake.

So, finally, the tale can be told about our Holiday Dinner on Monday night. As luck would have it, Tim was off of work on Monday, so I took full advantage of the situation and exercised, took a shower, then skipped off to the spa for a facial. Extravagant! When I finally meandered home, we set off again for lunch and shopping for last-minute dinner items.

Not only was this Christmas Eve Eve, the weather guys were calling for lots of snow overnight. So the grocery store was totally packed. Tim wanted to be home and cooking by 3, he said as we walked out the door at noon. No problem.

By some miracle of the Target gods, we were actually home by 3:15. The majority of the three hours we were out seemed to be sucked up by sitting in traffic. Living by a mall is not fun at Christmastime.

We started slicing vegetables for the sauce, glazed carrots and mashed potatoes. The shallots for the sauce (a lovely port-wine number) nearly did me in. I was literally slicing them with tears running down my face.

So the sauce was started and left to reduce for its required 40 minutes. At about 4:15, we got the crown rack of lamb out of the refrigerator.

When we took it out of the freezer the evening before, we let it sit on the counter all evening long, then put it in the refrigerator to finish thawing all night and the next day.

No good.

The thing was frozen. Solid.

Uh-oh.

I had gone from, ‘Oh, honey, wait until you see this beautiful piece of butcher craftsmanship!’ to ‘What the hell do we do now?!’ in less than 60 seconds.

I did what any sane woman would do: I got out the Miracle Thaw. For those of you not familiar with the Miracle Thaw, it’s one of those “as seen on TV” deals from a few years ago. I have no idea what it is made of, how it does its miraculous thawing or the like. I just know that it works great at defrosting frozen chicken breasts in less than an hour.

Tim freaks out after five minutes on the Miracle Thaw and puts it in the microwave on defrost. For the eight-and-a-half pound crown rack of lamb, this will take one hour and fifty minutes. By this time, I’m screaming at him about how he hasn’t even let the Miracle Thaw do its miracle thawing, and take it out of the microwave and back onto the Miracle Thaw.

It got even uglier from there, once the Miracle Thaw thawed the bottom, but no further, after 30 minutes.

I did what any woman would do: I called my mother. She wasn’t home. So I called my stepmother.

She said to put it back in the microwave on defrost. She reassured me that it wouldn’t dry it out. This was sticky, though. I was wrong. Tim was right. Damn.

I admitted defeat and we put it back in the microwave.

Now, it’s getting close to 5:30 and our guests will be arriving at 6, so we’re completely freaking out. The microwave still says that it needs an hour and fifty minutes to thaw this baby. We plead with the microwave, but it does not budge.

I do what any woman would do: I go to take a shower.

When I come out, the sauce is reduced, the potatoes are ready to be mashed, the carrots are ready to be glazed and the lamb is coming out of the microwave. It is 6 o’clock.

Then, a Christmas miracle: it is thawed! It seems that the bones and give the crown rack of lamb its name helped conduct the heat down into the lamb, speeding the thawing process. Yay, blessed microwave! The Miracle Thaw sobbed quietly in the sink.

So, into the 475-degree oven it goes. My mother- and father-in-law arrive. The recipe says to take it out when the meat registers 130 degrees. After 20 minutes, the thermometer reads 60 degrees. Uh-oh.

My brother- and sister-in-law arrive.

After 35 minutes, the thermometer reads 100 degrees. Getting closer.

Finally, after 45 minutes, the crown rack of lamb is done. And it’s beautiful!

Now, we’re just waiting for my other brother- and sister-in-law and their two kids to arrive.

At 7, we’re all seated at the table, enjoying Tim’s delicious rosemary and garlic crown rack of lamb with port-wine sauce, garlic mashed potatoes and glazed carrots. Everyone loved it.

Except the Miracle Thaw.

We’ve been snowed in for Christmas! We got eight inches of snow on Christmas Eve, so that meant that we had to scrap our plans for Christmas in my hometown. This is the first time that I have ever not been at my Grandmother’s house for Christmas. Ouch.

Anyway, since I still haven’t gotten around to typing up our misadventures from Monday night, I’ll leave you with the amazing recipe that we used for our crown rack of lamb. (And thanks to my ever-observant father-in-law for passing it along. Thanks, Luther!) If only because someone was referred here yesterday from AOL while searching for “crown rack of lamb.” Hello! The sauce is excellent too, just don’t pay any attention to the nutritional information at the bottom…

Merry Christmas, ya’ll.

It is done. And it was an unqualified success! Yay, Tim, meat-master of the crown rack of lamb!

I will have to tell you the whole story tomorrow (er, today, that is): about how the huge rack of lamb was still frozen at 5 p.m., how Auggie was completely sick of watching us cook and not paying attention to him, and how Tim and I nearly took each others’ heads off because we couldn’t agree on the quickest method of thawing…

But right now I’m totally exhausted. And Auggie will probably be up at 6:30 again tomorrow morning.

Yawn.

Hey, it’s supposed to snow tomorrow…

A quick post on the weekend’s festivities.

We had a great time down in my hometown. Tim and I were completely blown away by The Two Towers, and I was also enamored by the box of Milk Duds that accompanied said movie.

Saturday morning, my brother and his family arrived and we had a ton of fun watching them open gifts. Auggie cleaned up (as expected) with a new stuffed dog (quite large, actually), an inflatable ball pit dealie (he’s going to love this one, I know it), a rough-and-tough new outfit with a bulldozer on the front (very butch) and a cute little Blue’s Clues ornament too. The other kids seemed to like their presents too, with Olivia (just a little over 2 years old) squealing, ‘Mommy, look!’ when she opened her gift.

I always try to get my nieces and nephew good stuff for Christmas, but I know they will never top the gift I got for my nephew Nicholas when he was around 3 or 4 years old. It was this little race car ramp dealie called Adventure Mountain and it had all kinds of crazy loops and ramps and stuff. The thing was pretty big too, practically as tall as him. Anyway, when he got the huge box unwrapped and saw the picture on the outside, he exclaimed, ‘I’m rich! I’m rich!’ and it was just the most precious thing ever in the history of time.

We spent today over at my dad’s house, where my stepmother was cooking up a wonderful feast. We had smoked turkey (my father is the high rama-lama of outdoor cooking), stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans and this really interesting concoction called baked pineapple. Tim and I are both feeling rather portly this evening.

So the big news is that Tim and I are hosting his side of the family tomorrow evening for dinner and gift exchanging for the kids. This only came about a few days ago, so I didn’t have a lot of time to strategize what we’d serve. This is the beginning of my rationalizing the fact that I bought an 8 and a half pound, $53 crown rack of lamb at Whole Foods last Thursday. (After I shot down the idea of buying a fully-cooked, spiral sliced, ready to serve Honey Baked Ham because it was too expensive.)

It was so beautiful, I had to buy it. To tell you the truth, I felt like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning, buying the biggest goose at the butcher shop for the Crachitts.

Once I walked out the door, reality started to seep in. Have I ever prepared a crown rack of lamb before? No. Have I ever prepared rack of lamb before? No. Have I ever prepared lamb in any form ever before? Still no.

At least I have actually eaten crown rack of lamb before. Once. At the Breeders Cup after-party four years ago in Louisville. Which we crashed (successfully, I might add). After I’d been drinking, probably.

Ah, well. It will be interesting, I hope. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I so wanted to get to bed before 11 tonight. Sigh.

It’s all my fault, really. I am the world’s worst at keeping gifts a secret. (You know how your family has that one thing about you that they always rib you about and have an endless supply of embarrassing stories about? This is mine.) Today may have set a new record for the shortest amount of time between buying a gift and then making the recipient open said gift.

Auggie and I bought the newly-remastered Slanted and Enchanted CD and Slow Century DVD for Tim at approximately 1:30 this afternoon, and by 10:30, I had convinced him to open it. This was also approximately 10 minutes after I had finished wrapping it. Is that sad? Is my ego so fragile that I can’t handle not knowing that someone likes my gift? Really likes it?

Sure, I can go off spouting double negatives with no fear of recrimination, but I can’t go half a day without knowing that my husband totally loves the new releases by his all-time, number-one, most favorite band. Again, sigh.

You’re probably thinking, ‘She just wants him to open her present so she can open his.’ But you’re wrong. OK, maybe only a little wrong. Tim wrapped three presents for me over the course of the evening and I must admit that I was dying to know what they were. But no sooner were they being warmed under the glow of our wee Christmas tree, than they were snatched away to be de-wrapped by the likes of me.

My husband is very thoughtful.

On a completely different topic, I am having a bit of an ethical dilemma. My first ethical dilemma of the week was solved this morning, and involved giving a gift basket of Budweiser, peanuts and various peppermint candies (to cover up the beer-breath, perhaps?) to our garbage men/trash collectors/sanitation engineers/whatever they’re going by these days. When I saw the gift basket at the grocery last week, I instantly thought my garbage-men-gift-giving prayers had been answered. I mean, I hate to stereotype here (i.e., big stereotype coming up here), but c’mon! Garbage men! Beer! Peanuts! Need I say more?

Once the basket was purchased, however, (and did I notice that I was not carded, oh you bet I noticed. And then wished that they sold these when I was back in college and underage, because surely she didn’t card me because she just didn’t notice that the gift basket contained alcohol, not because I look all of my 28 years.) Where were we? Oh yes, the ethical dilemma. I started to worry about whether one of the garbage men was a recovering alcoholic and my insensitive and stereotypical view of garbage men (although true in his case) would lead to his falling off the wagon and resuming his boozy ways. I gave it to him anyway. There’s always AA, right?

Anyway, back to Ethical Dilemma #2. I’ve been trying to think of something to get our mail carrier for Christmas as well. (Dude, I didn’t even stop to think about if he was Jewish. Or Muslim. I am an insensitive lout. Crap.) When we were at church last Sunday, the youth group was selling those jars of layered cookie dough ingredients and I thought, ‘Eureka! This is perfect for our mail carrier! And it only costs five bucks!’ (Last year, I went all-out and bought Woody the Mail Carrier a Hickory Farms gift box deal. Yeah, I know. I rock. Anyway, turns out that was a good thing because Woody retired this year. I hope. Actually, I don’t really know what happened to Woody at all. Hope you’re A-OK there, Woody!) Well, the jar has a sticker on the top of it with a religious message. It’s not anything like, ‘Hey, you’re going straight to hell if you don’t join our church! Enjoy the cookies, heathen!’ Just a little phrase about the baby Jesus or something. (Yes, I could quote it for you here, but it’s way across the room and I’m not getting out of bed right now to go see what it says exactly, so quit whining.)

My dilemma is this: Is it a violation of the separation of church and state to give my United States Postal Service carrier a jar of cookie dough makings with a religious message on it? Goodness knows that I don’t want any trouble with the Postmaster General.

We leave for my mother’s house tomorrow, friends, where we will partake of the free baby-sitting and go see the new Lord of the Rings movie. So this is probably it until after the holiday.

Have some egg nog. You deserve it. Merry Christmas!

Sorry for going MIA for a few days there, friends. The weekend swept by me faster than a wiener dog with its head stuck through a plastic bag’s handle (this actually happened once). I have gifts, though! Check out the dozens of new pictures!

I’ve got tons of work to do on all of those homemade gifts I planned for the holiday, so I’ll do my best to come up with something entertaining to post soon! Promise!

It’s too bad that I only have time to blog late at night (except for today. And yesterday. Shut up.), because I always get a couple of extra hits from weblogs.com whenever I update in the daylight hours.

Now that we have fancy-schmancy referral logs, thanks to Tim’s sharp programming on the new site, I noticed the other day that someone got here by searching for “how to make swords” on Google. Thinking it was a fluke, I giggled and moved along.

It happened again yesterday, this time on Yahoo. So you know that I just had to go to Yahoo and do the same search — and we’re the #7 site for “how to make swords”! I find that very humorous.

Who the hell wants to know how to make swords, anyway? Don’t you need to be some sort of smith to make a sword?

I know, it’s all those last-minute crafty moms who are trying to figure out what to make for their goth sons for Christmas! ‘Here, honey, I made you this cinnamon-scented Sword of Doom myself! Hand-forged it in the basement while you were at school! Enjoy!’ She could even use her Bedazzler on the sheath.

I think there should be a reverse-Google search engine. You know, where you type in your domain and get a list back of all the search words that would refer to your site. Dude! I thought of it first! Of course, I have no programming skilz, so if you can make this happen, at least, like, link to me or something, OK?

I officially finished up my Christmas shopping this morning, complete with a visit with Santa for Auggie.

Am I the only one that gets depressed that this is more of a photo opportunity than an actual visit with old Saint Nick anymore? Santa doesn’t even ask what you want, as far as I can tell. It’s more of a move-em-in-head-em-out sort of procedure.

Sigh.

So I sat Auggie on Santa’s knee and he immediately freaked out, just as I knew he would.

At least Santa looks happy.

Once again, it’s late.

I’m tired. I’m grumpy.

I think it would be best for all of us if I just went to bed.

Good night.

(We went to Wal-Mart this evening, if that tells you anything.)

Ah, a fleeting moment of quiet as Auggie sleeps, and, for the first time in two weeks, I’m not so exhausted that I nap with him.

You cannot imagine my relief when I woke up this morning feeling much better. My stomach wasn’t perfect, but it was much improved over last night. When I finally went to sleep, I fully expected to be up and retching within a few hours. My stomach was cramping that badly.

So today has been like a gift! I got out of bed in the best mood. I even made cookies for the meeting we attended this morning. Of course, I ate too much of the batter, which didn’t make my stomach feel any better, but these are all good things.

For those of you who don’t know me, you should know that I have a personal law forbidding vomiting. I always joke that it’s against my religion, but that’s not far off. I halfway believe that the reason I’m not sick today is simply because I’m too stubborn to throw up.

The only times I’ve been physically ill in the last ten years (or longer) is when I’ve had too much to drink. Morning sickness never got me, even. Even Romano losing his arm on the season opener of ER (right after dinner, no less) made me a little green, but there’s no way I’m puking.

Yes, I realize that I am virtually guaranteeing that I will be vomiting my eyeballs out by the end of the week by writing this, so I’ll shut up now.

Not good, my friends.

It started after dinner tonight. My stomach just didn’t feel right, you know? I didn’t eat all that much, but I just felt kinda uncomfortable. Then Auggie woke up from his late nap and was ready to eat his dinner, so I left Tim to handle that.

By the time they were done, I was officially queasy. By the end of the West Wing, I was full-blown nauseous.

Now, I’m just laying here quivering, hoping that this isn’t the virulent stomach flu that is tearing its way through the Midwest’s collective digestive system. (Aren’t you glad that I left out the details about the bathroom unpleasantness, the stomach cramps and the teary call to my mother?)

So what now?

I’ve got stuff to do. I have no time (not even the 24 hours my mother assures me it takes to get through it) to deal with a stomach virus. Because once I get over it, Auggie will get it, then Tim will get it, and all of a sudden, it’s Merry Christmas and I’m buying Old Spice for everyone at your friendly neighborhood Walgreens.

Is it better to wish that I just ate some bad Tofu Pup at our play group potluck this afternoon? Dude, if I am the epicenter of this stomach bug cutting a disastrous swath through our play group, they may never speak to me again. Or they might just vomit every time someone mentions my name. Either way, not pleasant.

Not good, my friends.