The RLA and I have a tradition: on New Year’s Eve, we stay home and cook together, then lock the animals inside and hide from the falling bullets. We watch movies and go to bed after we watch the ball drop in Times Square. On New Year’s Day, we listen to the Moody Blues. All day and all night and probably the next day.

This year, we went to see Avatar in 3-D on an I-Max screen. I’m still conflicted. I loved the movie, and yet, it was an empty enjoyment, like the popcorn I ate. There were visuals that were magic. The flora and fauna of the imaginary Pandora were believable and beautiful. But that was it. Such plot as there was was lifted wholesale from Dances With Wolves, Pocohontas, Moby Dick and Apocolypse Now. Sort of. Toss in a handful of “noble savage” mythos and a shake of anti-war (specifically anti Bush’s war) and you have it. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that, it was just… tissue. Disposable entertainment that left no mark in my mind, except for the visceral and visual. The RLA compared this to seeing the original Star Wars for the first time, and the feeling that you were in the presence of a new era in film making. And yeah, I can see that, but no. Star Wars, for all of the bad dialog and recycled mythos, had a much deeper soul and resonance than Avatar.

That doesn’t mean I won’t want to own a copy for home. But there has to be more than just a two-hour trip to another world. There have to be characters that you care about and frankly, the only ones that I wanted to see more of were the Etruscan-style horses. I would love to see a coffee table book on the planet that the animators created, but the buffed up Smurfs? Meh.

Over the long weekend, I spun up another five yarns. I made a lasagna, and a pot of cabbage soup (it’s still simmering as I type). For the coming year, I decided to try and photograph everything I make each weekend, from fiber to food, and post the results each Monday. We’ll see. In May, I have a spinning workshop in Sarasota. Later in May, the Surrogate Daughter Number Two graduates college, and I am expected to be in attendance (and will be proudly). In June, we have the annual week at the shore. In August RJ and I are scheduled to go to New York for Blogher 10.

I am determined this year to launch Mild Burning Symptoms, with or without the assistance of the RLA. I am determined to reduce the fabric stash in my studio, whether by selling it off on MBS, or by making quilts, I just need to empty the space.

We’ll see how that goes.

Finally, I went to see my Mummy today. She held my hand tightly and said “baby.” I didn’t stop crying for five minutes. And that is why tonight, I am making cabbage soup. It was one of my favorite dishes that she’d make in the winter. It’s a pure peasant dish: cabbage, onions, beef bones, carrots and tomatoes. There are brown sugar, sour salt, lemon juice and raisins. It is deep and sweet and sour, all at the same time. I can smell it simmering in the kitchen.

Happy new year to all, and may the second decade of the 21st century suck less than the first.

Tante Leah, Tallis Maker to the Stars

Or, you know, I would be if I could just get a star to accept the gift of one. I’m not going to name names here, but a certain Rock & Roll Hall of Fame drummer (or more likely, his agent) just refused this one.

With all of the nice Jewish boys out there who are currently hot comedic stars, you would think that at least one of them would like to upgrade his tallis from the one he got when he was Bar Mitzvah’d. Steven Spielberg has how many kids? Surely one of them is turning 13 and needs a tallis. Why not a Tante Leah custom design?

Why? Because nobody knows I’m out here, making the most elegant, individual and did I say beautiful tallit around. I’ve decided that the way to fix this glaring omission is to get myself a celebrity endorser.

The question is who. Adam Sandler? Andy Samberg? Paulie Shore? (Is he even still around?) Sarah Silverman? Who represents the quality and sophistication of a Tante Leah product? Tim Gunn? Well, yeah, probably, but he’s not Jewish and I don’t think I could afford him anyway.

After much thought and deliberation, I am convinced that the celebrity endorser Tante Leah’s Handmades needs is Ben Stiller. So here’s the offer. In exchange for Mr. Stiller allowing me to use a photo of him in a Tante Leah tallis, with an appropriate and enthusiastic endorsement (ex: Round for round, and pound for pound, there’s no finer tallis in town) I will donate 10% of my gross to Mr. Stiller’s Stillerstrong charity. (This could add up to bupkis, or if Mr. Stiller does his job well, it could make a decent donation, say $250 a year.)

What seems like years ago, but was really only a month, I joined the Cobaya Gourmet Guinea Pigs, and underground foodie affair here in Miami. I grabbed Star and the two of us signed on for the VIP (Very Important Pig) Roast, starring the culinary stylings of Chef Jeremiah Bullfrog. It was advertised as an Iron Chef-style affair, with a main course of roast whole pig and five other dishes made of various and sundry pig parts. Well, I am all about the pig, so I was first in line for that. Literally. Star and I were the second and third to arrive at Harvey’s on the Bay, a fabulous and undiscovered neighborhood bar housed in the back side of an American Legion Hall up on Biscayne Bay in the still-ungentrified 60s.

The feast began with chicharones, or cracklins as we call them in the Deep South. Rendered and fried tidbits of pig skin. In my culture, we do the same thing with poultry skin and it’s called grebenes. Same thing, different animal: fried heart attack on a plate.

The cracklins were accompanied by little cocktails made of organic cherry syrup, seltzer and moonshine. Tasted like Dr. Brown’s Cherry Soda, but left you face-planted on the concrete.

We then all trooped outside to meet the guest of honor, and watch as Chef Jeremiah prepared the caja china and loaded up the pig.

Back inside for some Chinese/North Carolina char sui bao. Chinese pork buns, but with a very un-Chinese bar-b-que style filling.

More like a Carolina, vinegar-based pork butt. Syringes of soy sauce were provided, and there were a couple of hot sauces as well. The prawn-chili sauce was particularly lovely.

These little guys were followed by something described as a Mexican/Viet Namese fusion. It was a soft taco, filled with the most gelatinous thing I’ve ever eaten. I was already started to head into a pork-induced coma, and so I missed the details. It was trotter meat or pork cheeks or something. Whatever. It was, taste-wise, one of the purest flavors of pig imaginable. This may have been my favorite dish of the afternoon, despite the icky mouth feel. The tacos were topped with a carrot and cabbage slaw, very sharp and vinegary and healthy splashes of those chili sauces.

After that, we moved on to pork bellies, and that is where I drew the line in the sand, pig-part wise. While I found the images of the pig nipples fascinating, and couldn’t shoot enough frames of them, the amount of fat and soft skin were beyond me to even attempt to eat. Chef J sliced up the bellies and made Cuban-style sandwiches, with pickles and mustard and crusty Cuban bread.

By now, the pig in the box was getting done, so we went out to check.

Yep, as the old Coppertone ads reminded us, it was Time to Turn. The pig got turned, coals were added and back we went for the next round of parts. Baby brauts or hot dogs? The skins were crisp and the meat juicy and the spicy mustard was a perfect compliment. I skipped the bun. Why waste time with bread when there is that magnificent pig roasting out back?

Finally, the pig was done. Chef Jeremiah brought it in and carved it up.

Plated, and with a side of sweet potato flan, this was the best roast pig, ever. (Except, and I’m sorry, Chef, but this is true, for the one that my friend’s father roasted all those years ago, on a set of old bedsprings, over a fire pit. Said piglet was the product of a wild boar getting to a domesticated female on a flower farm up in Stuart. That is the roast pig gold standard.) Still and all, I couldn’t have asked for more or better food and company. I’ll be back for more of the Cobaya Guinea Pig events. Next time, I’ll bring my own, titanium spork.

I had a doctor’s appointment last week, a follow-up to the diagnosis of low thyroid activity. So my doctor is happy with how things are going, and as he opens the examining room door to take me down the hall to the lab for my bloodwork, he says “Let’s head up to the lab” and because I’ve seen Rocky Horror enough to know how to do the Time Warp (It’s just a jump to the left), I replied with “And see what’s on the slab.” This made us both very happy. So I’m sitting and knitting and waiting for the nurse to do the blood draw, when I hear the girls up at the front desk start to complain to another one of the staff members to stop changing the office radio to a country and western station. She replies that this is Taylor Swift and she’s awesome and they need to broaden their horizons.

This leads my doctor to pop out of his office and chide the young woman that she’s one to talk about broadening horizons when she was the person who thought Bruce Springsteen did a lame half-time show at the Superbowl.

I’ll pause for the enormity of that to sink in.

In the event, I let out an audible and completely involuntary gasp and jumped out of my chair and ran out into the hall where this conversation was taking place. I pointed my finger at the girl and said “Blasphemer!” She didn’t bat an eye. No, in fact, she said that it was a weak performance, that the Boss is a talentless old hack and that she’d never seen anything worse in her life. At that point, it was a good thing that I’d jumped up and left my knitting needles in the lab.

I pointed my finger at her again and began to yell “SHUN!!!! SHUN THE UNBELIEVER!!!!” as I chased her down the hall and into another office. My doctor found this whole exchange humorous, which is a good thing I suppose or I might be blogging from a padded cell.

I went to my childhood home on Thanksgiving day, for the annual feast, now held at the Girl Cousin’s home. For twenty years or more, it was my mother’s feast, and the family, and the widows and the orphans all piled in. It went from a sit-down dinner with the good china to a wild and wooly buffet off paper plates. Along with Passover, Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. Food and family and both in wretched excess.

This year was subdued, as the Girl Cousin’s mom was in the hospital with pneumonia. We took her a plate of all the home-made goodies and she sat up in a chair and teased me and ate everything. Then the sun set, literally, and the dementia came back and the anxiety and anger and the family decided to get her out of hospital and into the local hospice house, until she could be stabilized and sent home.

Only the first part happened. My Auntie Em went to the hospice house and 48 hours later, she was gone. She left this world surrounded by her family, which is exactly how she lived her life. The RLA and I drove home to Miami, switched out the clothes in our suitcase and drove back north for her funeral. There was more to it than that, of course: I had been called for jury duty, we had doctors’ appointments and the stupid cat had to go back to the vet with his chronic weepy ear.*

Back north, funeral, back south, back to work. And now my mother has “issues”. I have a new pack of cigarettes and a full bottle of scotch. More later, I promise. It’s just that I am finding it hard to be amusing these days.

* The vet says that this is medically known as “squishy ear syndrome”. He also says that Ming has a “chronic, pernicious exudate”. I say that needs to be the name of my next imaginary punk band…at least Pernicious Exudate.

I have a friend, a long-time friend, and I talk about her here now and then. She’s The Coolest Person In The World TM. We were neighbors in New York City a million years ago, and while we haven’t stayed in touch in anything resembling a regular way, we are still friends.

In June, I bought an i-phone, and my Twitter habit began shortly after that. I started following famous people (Lauren Bacall, Brent Spiner & Kevin Smith). I started following other bloggers (SinPantalones, Quisp & RJFlamingo). And I started following The Coolest Person In The World’s daughter, who is, like her mother, very cool and very funny.

Once in a while I would reply to her tweets. I loved reading about her life in New York City and about her mother: what she was cooking, where they were going, the weather out in the Hamptons. It made me feel closer to my friend than I had in years. It also, quite honestly, made me feel a little bit creepy and voyeuristic, but what the hell, you know? I mean, I’ve know her since she was a twinkle in her papa’s eye, it’s not like I was some Aqualung-type pedophile stalker. And anyway, she’s in college and aspiring to be a stand up comedian, so having strangers read her Twitter feed is something that she should expect.

Several weeks ago, the daughter blocked me from her Twitter feed. It was a surprise and made me feel a lot creepier. I am not exactly hurt or anything, but I miss reading about her mother. It was like being neighbors again, not friends separated by miles and years.