In Which Our Heroine's Cookies Rock

11 December 2003

The biggest and best news from yesterday was not my cookie-baking, my truffle-making, my soup-cooking, my editing, or my miraculous editing insights. Nope. It was the arrival of Bridget Elizabeth Orser in the world. Yay! My mom says new babies are her favorites but she enjoys the slightly used kind as well. Right now the slightly used kind are my favorite, as I am not ready for an upgrade, personally. And the wee Bridget should not be too used by the time I get to play with her. I'm sure Heathah and Dave are thrilled to have a healthy baby (and have the delivery over with!), and I hope Siri and Gavin are, too. (I think new sisters are probably more ambivalent things than new daughters, at first.)

This is actually the first baby Heathah has had who didn't freak me out by her very existence. Siri was one of the first of my friends' children, so it was "My friends are having kids, weird!" Then with Gavin, it was, "My friends have two kids, weird!" But apparently Mrissas, like trolls, count "one, two, many, lots." This baby? Not weird.

Well, not yet. Give her another year or two living with my friends and having me and other friends dropping in.

So. I started catching up on periodicals -- read the December Analog and started the December F&SF, still have another issue of each to go -- but mostly ran errands, did lots of edits, baked cookies.

Cookies. Cooooookies. I did teacakes and pepparkakor and truffles yesterday. The pepparkakor -- oh, they were beautiful. There may not be enough of them; we'll see. But the dough was so splendid. It came out just like it was supposed to and not like it did in California at all. I blamed California, and it turns out I was right. Or at least the molasses we could find there. Something Californian was the problem, because the dough didn't stick to the cabinet, or the roller, or my fingers; it cut beautifully and came away from the cutters beautifully, even in the tiny little baby moose cookies where the back leg is always a beast to get out of the cutter.

We have pepparkakor pictures, or will soon. We have big mooses and baby mooses and shooting stars and regular stars and rocket ships; we have hearts and candy canes and Minnesotas with a little frosting star over the Cities; we even have a couple of trains with names on them. We used to have a lot more in the way of rocket ships, but somebody who shall remain C.J. ate several of them. ("They were nearest to me," he said. Riiiight.) I am so happy with my pepparkakor. It's a symbol, see, of everything going better. I came up with brilliant and insightful edits for my stupid old novel. In large part because of the pepparkakor.

You know how Barenaked Ladies record one song every album naked, and you have to listen and find the one with all the crazy energy and that's probably the naked one? I think you'll be able to find the gingerbread chapters in my novels that way. Maybe entire gingerbread short stories. Who knows?

I feel that there is one potential problem with the pepparkakor, and that may be that I may not have made enough. Which would be a pity and a shame. On the other hand, we have loaf gingerbread, and we have other cookies, and...I could always make more....

It's a pretty social end-of-week/weekend I've got going, with Curt and Stella and just Mom and then both the folks together and then Beth and Josh's open house and...so on. I have on my list to call Em and Aaron, but I think I will call them to make plans in advance, because the near-term is pretty packed with edits and events. I'd also like to meet Bridget Elizabeth, but I will let Heathah figure out when she can handle any of that.

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