About once a year, Elie makes babka. It's his mother's recipe and it kicks butt. The babka is just sweet enough and great with coffee. It's a whole wheat-ish yeast dough made with a good bit of buckwheat honey. The dough is rolled out and spread with cocoa powder, butter, sugar, walnuts, and some raisins. Then it's rolled up, given a crumb top, and baked. It comes out good and dense.

This year he used our terracotta bread pan. We don't use it often, but when we do I am pleasantly surprised by how well it works. FYI.

Here's something else deliciously good: Cupcakes of Catan! Do you play Settlers of Catan? You should! It's a fun game, a board game in the role playing style, but without the extreme dorkiness or commitment. Everyone in Elie's lab and a few of the programmers I work with like to play it. (Really, scientists and programmers like it and you say it's not dorky? Whatever-so much fun!) Anyway, someone on flickr has made an all-cupcake version of the game--Cupcakes of Catan. So cool.

It's just very minor rule breaking. Marzipan is so cute!

World Market is going out of business and they had marzipan leftover from Christmas cheap. We all love the marzipan, so maybe I'll go and buy some more. It's a funny sweet because they look so different from each other and so fruity, but they all taste almond. But, it's still hard to get the mind to understand that. Like, I didn't want to eat the banana one at first because I think that fake banana is one of the grossest flavors. But they all taste like almond.

This afternoon Eva and I played MadLibs. It was her first MadLibs experience. They can be pretty hilarious--I forgot that. Hilarious to me was that if you ask Eva to name two female celebrities, she names Miley Cyrus and Judy Garland. In the MadLib, they interviewed each other.

So, I'm feeling like I keep missing things by not paying attention. It's such a bummer. Like Mini Swap, and mobile swap, and probably other fun swaps I haven't read about yet. Virtual Quilting Bee looks like awesome fun. I am really looking forward to seeing each person's quilt. I think Mama Urchin really nailed the whole procedure. Having the person whose month it is send fabrics out so that everyone else knows what they're aiming for is genius. I'd like to play that game. Maybe I'll start one?

I just about always have a basket of laundry in some stage of the laundry process sitting my my room. This gets me because it's not like we do laundry by hand. A machine does all the work. We just have to put it away. But in order to put it away, we have to take time from other things in order to fold the laundry and pair the socks. This is mostly where I get slowed down.

I want to do a lot of things and none of them is folding laundry. If my room were pretty, I would probably make a bigger effort to keep it pristine (ok, tidy), but it still has the wallpaper and roller shades of the former inhabitants. On humid days it even smells like them. Yuck. Guess whose task it is to fix that? Mine, but I'm not really doing anything about it at the moment.

I want to do lots of things, but there isn't time for them all. Perhaps you know how that is? Currently I have a lot of big things that are in various stages of progress (a quilt, a sweater, a guest room, a kitchen, a bathroom), and I would really just like to have something that is completely done. I actually started two things yesterday, a little bag and kool-aid dyeing, thinking that they would be succinct little projects, but then I was missing a zipper for the bag and I forgot about the soaking for the yarn, so they ended up in the unfinished pile.

The kool-aid yarn will happen today. Beebs and I are really looking forward to it. The rest will all happen eventually, won't it? Baby steps?

Do you know why I love banana bread? It makes me feel homey and thrifty and it's done in one hour. The heart, of course, is for I love you.

I got a kitchen ceiling this weekend. Whoo-hoo! Right now it's just drywall screwed to joists, but already it is a million times brighter in there. Progress is good.

I had no part in making the pretty little cookie above. It's my daughter's creation. She made it at her friend's house, and it was the good idea of her friend's mom, my friend. All my child's cookie decorating is done at friends' houses. I always really like the idea, but i seldom get around to actually doing it. Maybe that's something we'll do when the kitchen is done and the kitchen is a place of beauty where I want to spend all my free time. I can see it now, March 2009--the Schwarz family decorates cookies in the kitchen! No miscellaneous ceiling crud fell in the icing!

Here's a short list of things I can't wait for in the new kitchen:

• a ceiling--got that!
• a floor that doesn't have a stamped-in mottled look that "hides the dirt", because if it hides the dirt, it never looks clean.
• lighting that does not match that of your average classroom
• white cabinets
• a pantry
• little baskets for potatoes and garlic and onions to go in the pantry
• a row of pegs for my aprons

Elie wants to paint the inside of the pantry the color green of jadeite glassware. I think that's a good idea.