This morning, Jeff was a guest on the “State of the States” show on SiriusXM Progress – if you’re a subscriber, you can hear the show on the SiriusXM app. He and the host talked about downballot races and redistricting – it was nice to hear him be referred to as an expert!
There was no Torah Study scheduled this morning, so Diane and I had time to take a longer walk than usual before services. The weather forecast called for rain off and on all day; we were lucky and took advantage of a mostly dry interval between 9 and 10am. We got sprinkled on a little bit, but we were also treated to a gorgeous rainbow.
The rain picked up soon after we got home – there were even some booms of thunder towards the end of the service, around 11:45am, which is unusual for this time of year. We had no plans to go anywhere, so we enjoyed the Shabbat quiet at home for the rest of the day.
I’ve always enjoyed seeing houses lit up with Christmas lights; my neighborhood doesn’t go overboard on decorations, but it’s still nice to see the lights go up after Thanksgiving, and I’m sorry to see them come down in January.
Shabbat Shalom! Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays!
My Toastmasters club doesn’t meet the last two weeks of the year, so I didn’t have a meeting this morning – instead, we went to the JCC and worked off the cookies we sampled yesterday to make sure they were OK to give to our neighbors.
We didn’t give all of the cookies to the neighbors, though; we had two left over. They didn’t survive the afternoon.
We also braved the crowds at the grocery store – we could have waited until tomorrow, I guess, but we found a parking spot and took our chances. We only had to wait behind one person to check out, so I think we won.
The weather forecast called for rain most of the day, but there was a nice long break during the late afternoon. We took advantage and got a walk in before things got messy again.
Happy Festivus!
I made chocolate chip cookies today, mostly to give to neighbors. I followed the official DoubleTree Cookie Recipe with two changes:
I had trouble getting the dough to cohere properly while I was mixing it – I’m not sure what was wrong. I’d left the butter out for several hours, so it should have been plenty soft, but the butter and sugars didn’t seem to combine well in the first mixing step (and the mixer kept ejecting sugar from the bowl even though I had it on low speed), and I had to mix longer than I expected to get everything combined at the end. I think that’s why I got distracted and forgot to add the rest of the chips.
In the end, the cookies came out fine (though light on chocolate), so we gave them to our neighbors with a clean conscience. I have plenty of chips to make another batch, too!
