Vicarious Living in the Hamptons

Many thanks for the many and varied Christmas CD suggestions. I will take these all under advisement. (Translation: I will look each of them up on Amazon and listen to a selection of tracks to see if it's the one--or maybe just one I'd like having). Also big apologies if I've not stopped by your blog very recently. I'm not sitting at my computer nearly so often as I used to...which means, not only am I not writing right now (Bad Alyssa!), but I'm not really blogging either. I need to catch up with everyone, but right now the only down time I'm getting is the thirty minutes between four and four-thirty every day that I watch Barefoot Contessa.

It's my time to see how the butter-half lives. (I cannot tell you how much this little pun amuses me.) For anyone who has watched B.C. or owns one of Ina Garten's (the Contessa) cookbooks, that's sort of an inside joke. Every recipe has butter in it. And if the item is of the baking variety, well there're generally a couple of sticks. Well yesterday she outdid herself with a Halloween chocolate cake topped with neon orange buttercream frosting. How many sticks would you imagine would be in the frosting for a 'sheet cake'? Five. Five sticks. I have to say, her food looks veerrrry yummy and she makes it look so easy, but good grief--I don't think I could ever bring myself to make the bulk of these recipes. I suppose that contributes to the soothing nature of the program. I watch Ina Garten ferry about to the fishmonger, the baker, the wild mushroom man, all while I lie on my living room floor. With her friends she has mini-parties with lavishly decorated tables and well-buttered entrees and desserts while I linger over a Jello pudding cup. And then it's goodbye to the Hamptons and back to my real life.

In other news, I'm currently (and very slowly) reading a book that is the most in-your-face novel I think I've ever read. And I mean that in a good way. The metaphors are so vivid and the talk is so snap-back that I suppose it's good I'm only getting it in small doses. It reminds me of those old fashioned PI movies where everyone's got a comeback for everything. But here it's a newspaper reporter and a woman at that. I will report back. I think it's called A Problem with the Facts but am too lazy to go check.

Hopefully this feeling passes as I'm hoping to visit all your blogs very, very soon.

P.S. This is my 500th post! Egad!