Early Christmas Present

FBR After her Rookie Effort with Blossoms

I received an ongoing report yesterday of the FBR’s embracing of the Christmas season. She commandeered several of the Amazon boxes that arrived into makeshift vehicles. She also reported for duty in the kitchen to assist her mother in the preparation of Peanut Butter Blossoms, although she thought sugaring her hand was more important than the cookie dough.  It is a process. The blossoms are my family’s signature Christmas cookies dating back to my mother’s incomparable batches while I was growing up. My wife took up the mantle and I was so pleased to see my daughter picking up the tradition. The FBR will need some instruction in the art of eating the cookie though. My daughter reported she likes to lick the chocolate kiss until her face is covered in chocolate. Her mother quoted her as saying, “Mom, I look so silly. I have chocolate on my face!”

Sugaring her Hand

I think She Hangs Around Too Much with Cats

Meanwhile, on the home front my Favorite Panamanian was in full recovery mode from another evening with the Maine Musquetera. As I chronicled in yesterday’s blog they spent a solid twelve hours shopping on Saturday and returned shortly before midnight. I stumbled upstairs after 11pm to find them baking cookies while the musquetera’s daughter caught up on social media postings following her immersion in musquetera shopping excesses. I woke up yesterday to find my wife beside me but with no recollection of when she joined me. When I asked she said they got into one of their usual late night conversations while the cookies baked and came to bed around 3am. These ladies are without peer when it comes to the art of dialogue. The Mainers had to leave by 8:30am to deliver the cookies in Maine and I’m glad the daughter was along to make the drive as the Maine Musquetera didn’t look any more alert than my wife did.

The Man, The Myth, The Legend

True testament to her fatigue is her willingness to join me in the Man Cave for the afternoon of football. There was a method to her seeming madness as she promptly fell asleep for the better part of the afternoon. She even slept through the first half of the thrilling Patriots-Steelers game which I found a tad on the unconscionable side. I’d always respected the Steelers until a trip a couple years ago to visit the Pittsburgh College Roommate. While Keene Friend and I were there we were exposed to a fan base that had sunk into a morass of whining. It must be the local media market because I know a bunch of Steeler fans from the Army who would have been embarrassed by their behavior.

It was therefore truly heartwarming to have Brady lead one of his signature 4^th quarter comebacks to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. I’m sure the Western Pennsylvania whiners will all be blaming everybody but themselves. They’ll call out the late touchdown called back when the Steelers player juggled the ball. The exact same thing happened in the first game of the year to the Patriots on a Gronkowski touchdown that was called back and could have changed the entire complexion of the game. The Steelers are a scary offensive team and in my view even more dangerous after their best receiver went out. Antonio Bryant and "JuJu" Smith-Schuster seemed a lot tougher than the prima donna Brown. A great early Christmas present as Brady once again served those self-important fans a healthy serving of crow. I’m sure they’ll blame everybody but the team for the last minute interception that sealed the win.

I polished off the last of the Raj Whitehall series by David Drake and SM Stirling with The Conqueror. The plot follows General Whitehall in his battle to unite the planet of Belleview after a thousand years of barbarism that followed the collapse of an interstellar human civilization. He’s sent by a very unappreciative ruler to conquer two sets of barbarian kingdoms and then, just before he’s executed, south to deal with an Islamic invasion. I’ve fallen in love with the two authors’ devotion to the tactics and strategies of the Whitehall books as they depict combat from the bloody meeting engagement level all the way to national strategy. I was hoping the book never ended but Raj ran out of enemies to conquer. I’ll miss him.

The Bad Cinema project count rises to #83 out of 100, with Assassin, a 1980s Robert Conrad TV movie about a cybernetic assassin.