Absence makes the Heart Grow Fonder

And pictures might help too.

I'm so not like Martha Stewart. I don't like her as a person. She rubs me the wrong way, but she's super organized or as organized as one can be with that many minions.
In my not-very Martha moment I realized I must embrace some of her ways if I want to be prepared for the holidays. And I also realized my prep revolves around alcohol, which I don't ever drink. But now we have our wine paid for and it's being brewed or whatever wine does before we bottle it. And I've got a start on my fruit cakes. Check out that picture...that bottle caused Kerry great delight. He thinks he will get to drink a large portion of it. I don't think so. If I follow my recipe for fruit cake as well as I have in the past, we will have the BEST freakin' fruit cakes in town and we'll be drunk. The recipe is for a bundt cake, but I make 7 little loaves. The recipe says to drizzle a few tablespoons of booze on the cake a day for a week or 2. I do this, religiously, lovingly, turning each cake every day. Oh, drat...a few tablespoons a day on a bundt cake, not a few tablespoons a day on a cake the size of my hand. Ooops...
Needless to say, I get requests for my fruit cake. The first batch, pictured, are chocolate cranberry.


This has become Emily's favourite meal, Rene's Caesar dressing makes it all good. Doesn't matter that a tablespoon of this stuff is 2 points.
This is Linus showing me how he slides under the fence, in his own words...
First, I pretend to smell the weeds by the fence. Then all innocent like I start to get low to the ground, real low. Then I use my fat head to push the chain link out of my way. And then I do my Superman and slide under the fence so fast Mom doesn't know what hit her. She's still trying to grab my tail, and then she gets mad because she remembers I don't have one. I do all this in about 4 seconds. Then I run like crazy to the other side of the neighbour's yard, get myself all freaked out because I've never been out of the yard and then I see Mom shaking a zucchini at me and I am a bit hungry so I run back to see her. I didn't like the way she dragged me back home, and I didn't get the zucchini, but at least she didn't yell at me.