It's a Christmas miracle! Christmas night, I set my earrings on the edge of my sink and in the blink of an eye, so quickly it made me laugh, they were sucked into a vortex down the drain. They're not valuable, but I really liked them, so the next morning, I read about sink traps in Dare to Repair. I stumbled a bit when my pliers weren't big enough to loosen the nut. Buying a wrench would be way more expensive than the earrings, which came on a card with two other pair from Target. But on a crazy whim, I tried my bare hands and because the apartment was rehabbed not that long ago, I was able to remove the trap, retrieve the earrings and put it back together with no leaks. It wasn't even gross.

I'm thinking of making something along the lines of a chicken pot pie today, so I read up in Joy of Cooking and my Betty Crocker Cook Book my Aunt Joc gave me in 1984. (She was right when she said, "You might think you don't need this, but you do." And now I say unto you young people that most of the food you'll eat you'll prepare yourself, and it will be more fun and better tasting if you learn some basics.) Cook books are a great time capsule and it was enlightening to read about a world that was quite different even in the time I've been an adult. For example, Betty C has a page on microwaves, with a section called "Is it Safe?" You're supposed to examine the appliance carefully as you take it out of the box. For what? Radiation? The page on metric conversion reassures us that converting will be easy because everything is based on hundreds, and "it will probably take another decade" before America has fully converted. Suck my still-eight-inches, Restoftheworld. The section I found most bizarre was on making your own TV dinners. Betty shows you how to fashion and nest these little foil containers into a tray and tells you how to make sauces for the meat and crap deserts you never have like cranberry compote, which can all heat up in the same oven. I can't envision anything less appetizing and yet labor intensive! She warns not to substitute natural cheese when the recipe calls for processed, and the fats are usually "margarine or butter". Even in the salad dressings, it says "vegetable or olive oil". Oh, also, the vegetable section tells you what times of year each item is available. When I was a kid, it was a big deal to get an apple and an orange in our Christmas stockings, shipped from Florida. Boy, it took about five minutes to become spoiled by having all foods available all the time, huh? (Thanks, Central and South America, btw.)