But enough about you

Here's what's happened lately --

• Elliott and I went to Minnesota for Christmas. Elliott had a bad cold the whole time we were there, which put a damper on things, but we had a good time anyway. My parents got me some Lego sets (at my request) and the excellent book Forbidden Lego, so I've been doing a lot of miniature construction work lately. Elliott is getting interested in "grown-up Legos" in addition to Duplos, which is great.

• For New Year's Eve, Jon and I hosted a small gathering at my house. Our friend David introduced us to a Spanish tradition of eating twelve grapes at midnight, one for each chime of the clock. A few of us pulled it off, which supposedly grants us twelve months of good luck and prosperity. I guess it's harder with the large, white variety of grape typically found in Spain at the end of the year -- but we were using little purple grapes that were easy to swallow quickly. David said it still counted.

• I've been re-watching Babylon 5, since Jon got me season one on DVD for Hanukkah. (My first Hanukkah!)

• I'm famous: I was on the Official Google Blog a few days ago.

• Over the past few months, I've been decluttering my house. A lot of stuff has gone to Chris' condo (or will soon) and I'm hiring a junk service to come and cart the rest away. I can hardly wait.

• I've decided that when I'm at home, I'm only going to cook vegetarian (mostly vegan) food. I get plenty of meat at work and at restaurants, and I've been wanting to expand my vegetarian cooking repertoire, so I'm going to try this for a while. Tonight I made spinach fettucine with basil-cilantro pesto and artichoke hearts -- a recipe from the Veganomicon -- and it was delicious. The pesto has almonds in it instead of cheese and I think it came out really yummy.

That's the roundup for the last few weeks. What's up with you, fair readers?

I impulse-bought a waffle iron last night, and this morning I fought hard with it and won. The first "waffle" was a big gooey mess that overflowed the iron and stuck to the grid. Much fierce scraping and cursing ensued. The next two waffles separated in the middle but looked waffle-y from the outside. The final, fourth waffle, was perfect.

Emboldened by my victory, and fortified by fresh fruit and waffle-y goodness in my tummy, I moved on to the next big project. I changed out the horrid, outdated, half-functioning light fixture on the ceiling of Jon's bedroom for a modern brushed-nickel fixture. That turned out to be even dicier than the waffle making, but with some help I got that done too.

Now I rest.