Gingerbread-House Failure

One by one, the seasonal lights are going dark. I took a short drive through the neighborhood this evening, and estimate that about half of the houses that decorated this season have un-decorated. Also, today was garbage pickup, and many trees were awaiting the trip to the landfill. We always wait till after January 6 to consider disposing of the outward Christmas show.

Today, Yuriko bought a couple of gingerbread-house kits. Why gingerbread houses have become a Christmas decoration, I’m not sure, but the passing of the holiday has cratered demand for the kits, and so they came cheap.

My career as a gingerbread-house builder was short. You’re supposed to glue the pieces together with frosting from a tube, then use the rest of the frosting to decorate the house, along with sprinkles and gumdrops that come in separate bags. Sure looks spiffy on the box. That should have warned me: nothing I could make would look like that. Sure enough, every time I got the walls and roof “glued” together, the slightest thing – a minor earthquake on the other side of the world, maybe – brought the house down. I have little patience for handicrafts, so I squirted frosting on one of the walls, added a few gumdrops, and ate that. The gingerbread wasn’t bad.

I have a new project, one that I’d like to do for all of 2007: A different blog, Dead Presidents Daily. It will give me an outlet for my interest in presidential – significa, since I usually dislike the word trivia, misused as it has been. Sometimes facts called “trivia” (especially by chatterboxes on TV) are actually “things every educated person should know.”

DPD will not replace BTST2, since I like it too much. It may shorten the average entry, though. Three to five graphs for each blog should be enough, so maybe I can manage it.