I'm making stew today instead of any more soup. It is far too cold for just soup and I want something more rib sticking. So I cubed and browned up some chuck roast, made a nice rich gravy, threw in some carrots and potatoes and put it in a covered clay cooker in the oven on 225 to simmer away until dinner time with only a few pokes from me throughout the day. Slow cooking is supposed to minimize the creation of transfats in the cookng process.

This will be wonderful for the kids when they arrive home from school today, exhausted and cold beyond all reckoning.

The bus driver laughed at me this morning because I'm sitting out there on my camp chair, wrapped up in my soccer blanket a.k.a. the Ugliest Afghan in the Universe, with my hat and scarf and gloves on, but hey, I wasn't the one sitting in a heated bus, now was I? I was pretty comfy, except for the exposed part of my face and my feet. My feet are never warm outside.

I have to run to town today and buy some organic milk and organic sliced turkey. I'm also going to go into Barnes and Noble and look for a couple of books. I won't buy anything there, I'm just looking to see if I want to buy these particular books or not. Amazon doesn't carry one of them and Half.com doesn't have either one, either. But if I like what I see, I can put them on my Christmas list.

All I really want to do is curl up in bed and go to sleep. Only I'm not the least bit tired so all that would accomplish would be getting me warm and giving me a very lazy morning. Too much to do for that. I could justify lazy yesterday, when I was watching the movie, because I was rolling newspaper sheets and folding them into kindling sticks (see Tightwad Gazette for instructions), and then when I got tired of that I knitted a little. But not today as no matter how hard I try to make them, the dishes simply do not rinse themselves or climb into the dishwasher on their own, and the laundry is even less compliant.