christmas pies

Going to Walmart at 2am on Christmas eve is not exactly the most festive thing. But we had to, after discovering the seal on our new bottle of cream of tartar was broken and a strange yellowish residue inside the lid. I'll only risk Alan's family with my cooking efforts, not shoddy ingredients.

Anyhow, we went to get gas and saw a very shady looking guy in a parka. If the Exxon at St Johns and I35 was robbed tonight, I know who it was. Then on to Walmart, full of the extra creepy people including the large man adjusting his crotch as he walked into the parking lot. A man with almost entirely gold teeth was pawing his woman in the baking aisle, and we were stuck behind three trashy women using food stamps and an enormous wad of twenties to buy fixings for a Christmas feast. It took forever, and now I'm hungry. All I want is a chicken sandwich damn it.

Anyhow, the lemon meringue pie is baking and should be done soon. Praise the mixer, for it made life so much easier when it came to the meringue. Hopefully the pie will be tasty. Alan says the key lime pie is good. Now I just have to get them to Bryan intact.

the trees

"Death is not the end; it is but another step on the journey, one we all must take." -Gandalf the White

I have been awake since half past nine this morning. My pies are waiting in the fridge.

Went to see Return of the King this morning with my mother and sister. My sister has a morbid fear of spiders, worse than my own, and my mother conveniently neglected to tell her about Shelob.

If these stories only give us one thing, it is the sight of even the smallest of hearts reaching for good in the face of overwhelming evil. That we are capable of so much more than we might believe of ourselves.

I have cried a lot today. When Arwen turns her horse, when Pippin sings and Faramir rides towards the river, when Aragorn sings at Minas Tirith and when Elrond pushes Arwen towards him, when the horsemen of Rohan charge towards the armies of Mordor screaming, when Eowyn speaks to Theoden on the field, when Sam picks Frodo up and carries him up Mount Doom... it's one of those things that I love about certain movies. You forget where you are, and that the people on the screen are actors, that Gollum is a creature of pixels and motion capture suits, you forget that it isn't real. It is real. It is real.

Afterwards I exchanged presents with my family, since I won't see them in the morning. My mother gave me something and I broke down in sobs in the parking lot of the theater. It's the last bottle of Moravian wine I brought home from the Czech Republic. It's a bottle I thought I would never see again, short of finding my way back to Kromeriz perhaps. It is the twin to the bottle I lost, destroyed by a cat years ago. It's a bottle of white wine that smells like the linden trees and the summer I started to find my way. She saved it all this time, and I didn't know. I never thought I would see it again. There are no words for this joy, for this gratitude.