When Martin and I first moved into our house I had some trouble with our stove. After living with questionably equipped kitchens I was not used to a fine, expansive stove that actually had all the knobs and buttons that is required for using a stove. When I began cooking on our new stove oftentimes the kitchen would fill with the stinky waft of melting, burning plastic. This eluded us for some time. I thought maybe a plastic handled pan had been shoved in the drawer below the stove. Nope. I thought that maybe there was some sort of plastic ring around the gas burners. Nope. After snooping around and enduring the stink for a few days we discovered what the problem was: the burners on the stove were different sizes! We had a tiny one in the back and two middle of the road sizes as well as one reserved for something called Super Boil. Instead of a superhero akin to the Spleen from Mystery Men, it actually boils water really fast, has a huge radius that disallows the use of smallish pans on its burner. This is where the stink had originated. The heat from the burners was attaching itself to the hardened plastic of the handles of my pans. The heat had also burned/melted the spout on our teapot. Melted it so much that the usual round opening where the water would come out had melted and hardened into a teardrop shape.
The teapot lasted us three years until the day before Thanksgiving; the plastic started to fall off in chunks leaving the metal round thing under it exposed and constantly falling into my coffee or tea. As amusing as this was, we decided to retire the old teapot and buy a new one.
This weekend I spent some quality time at the mall with my bud Sarah. We bought many things, among them a new teapot.

So I have been lax again with posting. I hope everyone had a good Turkey Day. We had Martin's parents for a visit with their little dog Cookie. I cooked a lot and we had a lot of leftovers, mainly of cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie- both apparently not faves of the NY crowd since Martin didn't partake of them either. We got to visit with our friend Genese who was in for a short visit from Japan where she is working right now. We visited her last year in Utsonomiya, jazz and gyoza capital of Japan.

Right now, I"m digging on this wacky site that compiles searches on Google by state and other measurements. I am particularly fond of the search for cornbread.

I am also slowly collecting gifts for the family and hope that I am almost through. Every year I have big plans to make stuff and donate stuff and whatnot and I never get around to it. Maybe if I start now the cute ideas I have for gifts will be finished by next December. For example, I was thinking of re-doing this in a Hanukkah motif for the nieces. So far I've been buying stuff off of etsy.com and procrastinating about holiday cards.

I think the holiday card funk is from a lack of a really funny or even good pic of this year. Not a good pic came from our trip to Buenos Aires unfortunately, I feel that Sweden and London were from too long ago. I do like this one from Arizona or this one from South Dakota. Neither are too exotic, but get the message across. Personally I like this one from South Dakota; it has a bit of mystery. But then again, Martin looks demented.
There's always this one of use looking schlumpy in Quebec. Any opinions? I can always just not send a picture and make everyone wonder what we look like. heh heh.