I finally got around to putting a new picture of Beth on my desk at work, and when I was showing it to my co-worker Jennifer, I told her the story behind it and she laughed and said I ought to put it on my blog. So I am heeding her advice.

This picture was taken about 30 seconds before Beth had a screaming fit. Here's why:

Beth normally loves getting her picture taken. She loves smiling for the camera and most of the time we come away from photo sessions with more cute pictures of her than we can afford to buy prints of. But for some reason, this year's Christmas pictures were not that way.

It was the first time we'd had her picture taken since she could walk, and all of a sudden sitting or standing still, even if she is the center of attention, just wasn't her thing anymore. And the Sears Photo studio in Albany has no door between the waiting room and the studio. She could still hear other kids out playing with toys in the waiting room, and she made it clear right from the beginning that that's where she wanted to be -- not standing still and smiling for the camera in some boring back room with Mom and some stranger with a camera.

So for this picture, she was already fairly grumpy. Then the photographer had her sit down and gave her a plate of milk and cookies. Beth loves drinking out of big people glasses without lids, and she loves cookies, so when the photographer plunked that down in front of her she picked the milk right up and got ready to take a big drink. You can see the little smile on her face: "I can't believe they're letting me have this whole glass of milk."

The photographer snapped the shot, Beth put the glass up to her lips...and nothing came out. She turned it upside down, then stuck her finger in the glass and poked it. It was fake! Completely fake! Just some white rubber in a glass that made it look like milk. And those three chocolate chip cookies? Fake too!

That was just about the end for us. Beth was furious at the nasty trick we'd played on her and did not want to smile pretty for the camera at all. After another minute or two of unsuccessfully trying to pose her, the photographer turned to me and said, "I think we've got enough." I took the hint and took my screaming child out of the photo studio.

Our family had a lovely Christmas, although a little overwhelming at times. For Beth, especially. Too much excitement, too much sugar, and not enough sleep equaled one cranky little girl by Sunday afternoon. I wouldn't want to miss spending time with either my family or Eric's family, but we may want to consider doing things differently next year. It all got to be a little too much.

But it is always good to visit with our relatives, eat lots of goodies and give and receive presents. Really, Eric and I are fortunate to be blessed with wonderful families--people we enjoy spending time with.

I started reading "Northanger Abbey" by Jane Austen this morning and am delighting in its satire of overblown Gothic romances. How can you not like a book that starts like this: "No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine."

Jane Austen is truly the master of opening lines; her most famous one being the beginning to Pride and Prejudice, of course. Northanger Abbey goes on to describe how Catherine wasn't exceptionally beautiful or sweet or good; her father was a clergyman but not a poor one; her mother did not die in childbirth; and as a child Catherine much preferred running around outside to studying her lessons, tending rosebushes, or nursing sick birds back to health. The novel continues in this vein whenever Catherine behaves sensibly; when she sees the man she likes at a ball with another woman, she doesn't immediately swoon because she assumes it is his wife or sweetheart. Instead, she remembers that in a previous conversation he mentioned having a sister and (correctly) assumes that this is she.

So far I've run across two quotes that I think hold just as true today as they did when this novel was written 207 years ago.

"It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire; how little it is biased by the texture of their muslin...Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it."

And the second, made by the hero of the story, Mr. Tilney, when Catherine observes that a book they are speaking of is very "nice." Overuse of the word nice is a particular pet peeve of mine.

"'Very nice,' said Henry, 'and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! it is a very nice word indeed! -- it does for every thing. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy or refinement;--people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.'"

(Read more from this section here).

Yes, Jane Austen is really the best what she does, although now that I have read Persuasion and half of Northanger Abbey in addition to Pride and Prejudice, which has been a favorite of mine for years, I see what people mean when they say she wrote the same novel six times. Really, all romance novels (and movies) follow the same basic plot, whether they were written in 1798 or 2005, and you either have to like them or you don't. I like them when they're done well, and Jane does them extremely well.

If you're interested in Jane Austen at all, check out this amazingly thorough site, which I discovered just now while writing this post.

Proverbs 16:18, and how true it is.

I suppose it serves me right. After all my bragging about my fabulous almond roca in my last post, I made another batch last night and it did not turn out at all.

I didn't cook it long enough, and instead of the almond layer turning out nice and crunchy, it was just dry and crumbly. So sad. I feel especially bad because my husband claims he never got any of the original, delicious roca. I'll have to try it again another time. Probably not till next Christmas. I can't afford to keep buying almonds.

I shouldn't have tried to make it at 4:30 in the afternoon, right before I needed to start making dinner, just when my daughter is starting to be cranky. I think I talked myself into taking it off the burner too soon because I needed to start the dinner, and Beth was calling "Upf! Upf!" and making the please sign desperately. As soon as I spread it into the pan I could tell it did not have the same consistency as the batch from last week, but I tried to tell myself it would be okay when it hardened. It was not.

Oh well, at least the 6 dozen Christmas cookies I decorated last night turned out pretty. I have two pies and a batch of dinner rolls to make tonight, as well as the rest of my presents to wrap.

The sour cream lemon pie and potato rolls should be a snap, since I've made them many, many times. I've never made coconut cream pie before, but it was a special request because it is one of my father-in-law's favorites, so I'll give it a go. My MIL e-mailed me last night and said she just uses vanilla pudding with a cup of coconut stirred in...after I had gone online and found a recipe for "Old-fashioned Coconut Cream Pie" and gone out and bought the THREE CUPS of cream required for it. So I'll try it the scratch way and with that much cream in it, how can it help but be good? If it isn't, well, I have some vanilla pudding in the cupboard.

It's been a week now since the Great Candy-Making Party but I am still proud of it so I will post belatedly. Some friends of mine had the idea that we should all get together and make Christmas candy. None of us had ever made candy before, but that didn't stop us. Five women, nine children under the age of 4, one crowded kitchen.

And amazingly, we had a blast and it turned out great. We made almond roca, old-fashioned fudge (not the kind you make from marshmallow cream), divinity, peanut brittle, some soft peppermint candy, chocolate coconut candy, caramels and more.


There were only a few mishaps: some chocolate got scorched in the microwave, one friend's son somehow got ahold of the peppermint extract and got it in his eyes, and my own little girl managed to fall over (perhaps with the aid of one of the older kids? We're not sure) and bite her bottom lip so bad that it bled quite a bit. But we survived, and I left feeling quite triumphant. I used a candy thermometer for the first time and got to learn what that mysterious cook-book phrase "hard crack stage" means. It has nothing to do with a serious cocaine addiction.

I was particurly proud of the almond roca, because I made it all by myself, and because right before I started making it my friend Jen Kau informed me that she has heard that almond roca is the hardest candy to make--that her mother-in-law has tried to make it five times and it has never turned out right. Also, the recipe I used said that you should not attempt to make it on a damp or humid day because the candy will not harden. Well, you just can't find an Oregon day between October and March that is not at least somewhat damp.

But I defied the weather and supposed difficulty of the recipe.The almond roca turned out great and it hardened just the perfect amount. And one of my friends said that of all the candy we made that day, the almond roca was her favorite. Yay for me and my new-found candy-making skills.

Here's the recipe I used, by the way. I found Elise's site through the Google homepage program; when you want to add content about cooking, that's where it links you to. I have also tried her herb-roasted chicken and tuna noodle casserole and found them to be quite yummy. And as with other online cooking sites that I like, the comments that other cooks can post about their experiences with the recipes are very helpful.

So my friend Heather turned me on to what is actually a quite comprehensive online bookstore that I would never have even considered checking out on my own: Walmart.com.

Now normally, I am all for supporting the little guy. On several occasions I have even purchased children's books at the Brownsville Pharmacy here in town. (Another place where I am often surprised by the selection and variety of the things they have in stock). But while Amazon.com had the books I wanted in stock, they couldn't get them to me by Christmas unless I paid extra shipping. No good, since A)these were Christmas presents for my parents; and B) I am poor and can't afford extra shipping.

Powells is normally a wonderful place to buy books and as far as real-life bookstores go, it is still the best one I've ever been to. How can you beat a place that takes up an entire city block and is full of books, books, books? But in this case, the gardening book my Mom wanted was $10 more than I wanted to pay, and they had Mere Christianity for my Dad in paperback only, not hardback.

Waldenbooks didn't have them in stock at the local shop in the mall, and both it and Borders have now teamed up with Amazon, so when it comes to online shoping, what Amazon has is what they have. I didn't know what I was going to do for presents, and then Heather told me about Walmart.com. They had both books, in hardback, for cheaper than anywhere else, and will have them to me by Dec. 20 at the latest, for only $4 total shipping. I'm a happy camper.

I know some people have a moral antipathy to shopping at Walmart because they are an evil corporate giant (I have my own: Carl's Jr. But that's another story). And like I said, I try to shop local when I can. But in this case, the big guy won out. Forgive me, small bookstore owners everywhere.

Since I mentioned it in my last post, I am going to go ahead and say that Ruthruff's Tree Farm in North Albany is the nicest of the three local tree farms we've been to in the last few years.

Our first married year, we were so poor, we had a second-hand Christmas tree. My college friends were living in an apartment, and were so excited about having their own place to decorate, they bought a Christmas tree even though there were all leaving to go home to their families as soon as finals were over. So when they were done with it, I stuffed it in the back seat of my Ford Tempo and drove it to our apartment in Salem. The top 6 inches or so stuck out the side window, and there were virtually no needles on it by the time I got it home. The only decorations were some lights and red glass balls (donated by my mother) and one little plastic ornament that says "Our First Christmas" that I bought at Hallmark because I felt compelled to start our family ornament collection, meager though it was.

Our second year, we bought a tree at a lot in Albany. My family had never bought a tree from a lot, we always went to a tree farm, and I felt kind of gypped. (is that how you spell that?) Eric grew up in a little town in Canada where you just walked out the back door into the snowy woods and cut down whatever tree you felt like cutting down.

So the next year we tried out a tree farm in Lebanon, except it wasn't what I thought of as a tree farm. It was more like some people owned some property with trees on it, so they decided to open it up to the public. We wandered around in the woods while it got darker and darker, trying to find one that would fit in our house and wasn't completely uneven.

Last year we went to a place in Corvallis, which was okay, but it took us awhile to find anything we liked and I thought it was kind of expensive. Also they didn't have many Nobles and I do like the Nobles (again, because it's what we always got when I was growing up).

This year I found a place in the D-H classifieds called Ruthruff's Tree Farm. They had lots of Nobles, as well as Douglas firs and perhaps other varieties as well--I didn't look. This was very similar to what I remembered from childhood. An old farmhouse and a big barn, and out back several acres of trees. Nicely planted in rows, trimmed into the perfect Christmas tree shape, in sizes from little tiny to gigantic. The guy gives you a saw and you wander around till you find the one you like. It only took us about 15 minutes, because there were lots of really nice ones. And the price was a dollar per foot cheaper than last year.

Beth was not quite as into it as I thought she would be. She loves being outside and normally is very excited to put her hat and mittens on and go. But this place was up on a hill and the chilly wind came swooping down the rows so that it was cold. She also seemed very confused about what we were doing wandering around out there. She was so cold and bewildered she wouldn't even smile, not a single bit, when I took her picture, and she normally grins for the camera. She perked up quite a bit when the nice man gave her a chocolate chip cookie though. The power of cookies.

Now the tree is outside in a bucket of water on the porch, just waiting for Eric to be done with finals tonight so we can decorate it.

Well, we had the meeting at the D-H yesterday about reporter blogs. Actually, it wasn't at the D-H, it was across the street at Ciddici's Pizza. But it was with D-H people.

And the upshot of it is that it looks like a few people will start having official Democrat-Herald blogs sometime in January. My boss Graham is very enthusiastic about the idea. My co-worker Jennifer Moody raised some really good points, asking what we can and can't say on our blogs.

As work-sponsored blogs, they aren't really like personal journals. If we are frustrated with the tax system, or something, do we have to call and get a response from the county assessor's office to go along with our blog? We would if we were writing a column in the paper.

In my personal blog, I can post that I think the Christmas tree farm I went to yesterday was the nicest one I've been to in the mid-valley...but if I posted that in a D-H sponsored blog, would all the other Christmas tree farmers (who also advertise in our paper) be up in arms?

How are blogs different from journalism? Of course, that question in particular is one I've heard many discussions about and I don't expect us to come up with a clean-cut answer. But as Jennifer said, we need to know what the rules are before we start this thing.

Interesting questions and we're going to have a meeting with our publisher to answer some of them before we start this thing. Also, probably (at least at first) there will be no clever names for our blogs. Which to me is a good thing because I was kind of dreading having to think of one. Observe the name of this blog and you can see just how creative and clever I am. The tech guy at the meeting, Christian (I don't remember his last name), suggested that as we develop "online personas" we could add our own little names. Do I have an online persona? Will I develop one? If so, what will my persona's name be? We'll see...

After taking an online self-test, I am forced to conclude that I have a serious problem with L.A.. I must say that I have no intention of changing my ways and I sincerely hope my daughter acquires the habit as well.

So I'm at that stage in my pregnancy where nothing fits and I just feel fat, fat, fat. I am 14 and 1/2 weeks (for those of you who are not up on the weeks of preganancy, that means I'm a little more than 1/3 of the way through. Full term is 40 weeks). My belly is getting big enough that very few of my regular pants fit me, but when I try to wear maternity pants, most of them are still too big and they sag down and I'm walking around hitching them up all the time. I'm at the point where I don't really look pregnant yet--just chubby.

The worst part about this is that I am going to a fancy Christmas party for my husband's work this weekend. I am actually kind of excited about it. It is at a country club and I've never ever been to a country club. I don't know what I'm expecting it to be like, I just know that in my mind, country club=rich and ritzy. So I'm looking forward to that.

But I had a heck of a time finding anything I could wear to this event. I ended up with an okay outfit but I still feel kind of self-conscious. Eric has told some his friends that I am pregnant but not everyone in the company knows so I hope that somehow word gets spread, or my outfit looks all right so that people will know: I'm not fat! Just pregnant!