I had a bit of trouble making our New Year’s Eve celebration work; it seems that one of our cookie sheets deteriorated to extinction over the past year, and another had something stuck to it no one could identify or remove, so we had to make due with one large baking sheet and several pizza pans, which meant a lot more scrubbing up between courses. On the other hand, despite cutting back on my usual purchases, I have quite a few menu entries still in the freezer as the night begins to end.

I would have done some of this earlier, but despite being a holiday it is still Monday, and my mother-in-law still had to do her grocery shopping, so I lost about four hours from the day for that. Fortunately, I had people helping me at this end, so food was already being prepared by the time I reached the party.

We played a game which my eldest gave me for Christmas, a trivia game called Such & Such. It’s interesting, but is pretty much a cross between Password and Outburst, with the twist that all answers are two parts connected. It was fun, except that members of our team kept wandering out of the room and had to be called back.

I’m pretty tired, but I’ve already opened the forum threads (hours ago, actually), so I’m going to answer them as well as I can before calling it a night.

–M. J. Young