Happy New Year!!!

Happy New Year!!! I hope it was a peaceful and hopeful ringing in of the new year.

We celebrated the New Year's Day as a family and extended family for our Christmas. (It seemed so much easier somewhat before my teen years and New Year's Eve parties.) Everyone cooks and brings something, we play Christmas Bingo (family tradition) that involved wrapped and inexpensive gifts that eventually are stolen from each other as the pile runs out), eat, and just spend the day together. Somehow everyone was able to make this holiday, including my two cousins that work in emergency services. The food, as always, is plentiful and filling. We took veggie pizza, a strawberry truffle, and soda. Despite my one cousin's continuing ignorance and long standing offensive vegetarian/vegan comments, there was plenty for me to fill my plate with; homemade macaroni and cheese, green beans, scalloped potatoes, fresh veggies, vegetables pizza, and dessert (one cousin made homemade mini cheesecakes with cherries on top... yummmy!). It was a filling day of family and talk of an upcoming wedding (I'm a bride's maid in it), my cousin's new pregnancy anouncement (twins!), and playing with the babies. I was stuffed (of course then I came home and heated some hot pretzel and cheese pizza bites).

From Henry Beston's 'The Outermost House' (1928): "The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."

What are your Holiday Plans?

Eating out with my family is often an eventful experience. There is usually a debate over where to eat, especially since my options are limited to salad in some places, but this afternoon while I was out trying to take care of some things we were able to agree on a place (without argument) where I could eat without problems and my brother could still satisfy his supposed meat cravings. We began the shopping for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It is very hard to say at his point how many people will be here. I took it as a mini victory that while sitting at lunch discussing the menu my mother made a reference to needing more non-meat items. Yay!

From Berke Breathed, 'Bloom County Babylon': "Dear Lord, I've been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us... a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird... a social being... capable of actual affection... nuzzling its young with almost human-like compassion. Anyway, it's dead and we're gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family."

Happy Veggie Day (every day is veggie day)

In the Words of Cloris Leachman: "As soon as I realized that I didn't need meat to survive or to be in good health, I began to see how forlorn it all is. If only we had a different mentality about the drama of the cowboy and the range and all the rest of it. It's a very romantic notion, an entrenched part of American culture, but I've seen, for example, pigs waiting to be slaughtered, and their hysteria and panic was something I shall never forget."

Hello Again.

It's another day, eating on the run and trying to keep up at the theater, and trying to get a 33 person cast into costumes (multiple costumes in most cases).

In the Words of Plutarch: "Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?"