Haven’t had enough holiday junk food yet? How about making some Frito candy? I know what you are thinking, but it’s actually pretty tasty. The recipe is from Cookie Madness.

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If I make this again, I might increase the amount of butter/sugar “toffee”. I didn’t have enough to cover the entire frito/pretzel/Reece’s mix. And I might use my traditional toffee recipe instead of the brown sugar. Not sure.

Um… did I go to sleep last night and wake up on April 1st, because this HAS to be an April Fools’ Joke:

Burger King just released a new men’s fragrance, Flame. The product website, firemeetsdesire.com, is hilarious. I just can’t get the image of the “King” half-naked on a bear skin rug out of my head. How incredibly disturbing.

I’m in the process of updating my iPod for our road trip this weekend and need some music suggestions. What do you like to listen to?

My longtime readers know I’ve joked about my questionable taste in music. I guess I’m just not a music person. The only time I have music playing is when I’m in the car, and it’s just easier to plug in my iPod (full of 80’s tunes) than seek out new music. Especially in areas, like Birmingham, where the radio stations suck.

So please help me! I need some new tunes to drown out the Jack’s Big Music show and Yo Gabba Gabba songs on repeat in my head. And the soundtrack to South Pacific. That’s the bad thing about watching South Pacific- I end up with Bali Hai and “Bloody Mary is the girl I love… bum, bum, bum, bum” as earworms.

A few days ago, my mom mentioned an article she read in the paper that was talking about the housing market in various cities. She read off the Birmingham, AL section, no real news there… sales down, people unable to get loans, no one has money for a down payment, etc. Mom also mentioned the median home price and described a home for sale that was featured in the article. It sounded a lot like ours. Later when I looked up the article online I was sure it was done by the same builder. Then I looked closer and realized, it was the house across the street from ours. Small world.

I’m sick of hearing about all the housing problems and foreclosures, I guess because it hits a little too close to home. I don’t want to think about the fact that our house hasn’t sold, even though we’ve slashed the price down to almost what it appraised for in 2003. We could probably take another 10 or 20K off the price and it wouldn’t make a difference. Most people moving into our area are looking for subprime loans, according to our realtor.

We were sandwiched between an upper middle class neighborhood and a lower/middle class neighborhood. A couple of years after we moved in we learned that instead of being annexed by the upper middle class neighborhood, the lower income families started to move in to get their kids in better schools. This led to “white flight”. (I’m so naive, I guess. I didn’t realize this still happened.) The city whose school district we were zone for started to talk about creating their own independent school district so they could stop this influx of lower/middle income black students. OK, so they didn’t say black. They didn’t need to. It was obvious. The funny thing about our neighborhood is I can remember my boss at the time (one of the most racist women I’ve ever met) drove me around to various nice “white” (translation- redneck) areas to look at houses, and discouraged us from looking in the area we ended up purchasing in. It was a nice quiet cul-de-sac, close to shopping and the interstates… we bought the smallest house on the block that needed the most work. I didn’t care if we lived next door to Martians, especially since the Martians would have a higher mortage payment. Who was I to judge?

Needless to say, I’ve had a lot on my mind lately. I still think we made the right decision to move to TX. The job market is worse in AL. Renting/leasing is just not an option for several reasons, one of which is that we’d need to put some $$ in the house (carpet, new A/C… things we were going to do in 2009). My dad has offered to give us whatever we need to get out from under the house. I don’t want to do that… pride, I guess. And I’m not even sure it would matter, given the mortgage lending situation. Sigh. I’d much rather be focused on fun, holiday things.

Such a serious face for a 15 month old.

I’m determined to try and get a few nice pictures of Daphne in the silk dresses I bought for her last year at the Janie and Jack Season Finale sale, before she grows out of them. We just aren’t sure where to take them. Unfortunately, natural light/indoor photos are impossible with the sun screens on the windows. It’s just too dark inside. The local parks aren’t exactly pretty, but at least we’d have a larger space to shoot. Hmm.. we might have to scout out a few locations.

Our favorite girl in her fancy Christmas dress.

Have I mentioned lately how much fun I have dressing her up? Yeah, that probably goes without saying. I should also mention she has a matching fur jacket and a cream wool coat, but it was too warm to wear either one today. Speaking of dressing up little dolls, have you seen the “What’s your favorite Barbie memory?” commercials? Those totally suck me in. I LOVED dressing and accessorizing my Barbies and totally can’t wait until Daphne gets old enough to play with them.

Today’s mini shoot was an opportunity for me to try out my new grey card. I need to read the instruction manual to make sure I’m doing it correctly, but I basically just took a picture of the grey card in the chair where Daphne was sitting, then set that as the white balance. It seems like it helped a lot. There is just so much to learn it gets overwhelming.

We started off early with a trip to Whole Foods to pick up a few things for Daphne. After a brief visit with the WF Santa (brief, because Daphne started to cry) we stopped in next door for lunch. And I don’t know what it is about that area, but another little toddler boy took an interest in Daphne. I didn’t see the whole exchange because I was busy cleaning up Daphne’s sandwich crumbs, but I did hear the mom say to her son, “Oh, do you LIKE her?” So single ladies looking for love, just head on down to the Whole Foods in Sugar Land, TX. It always works for Daphne.

After lunch we stopped by Kohl’s and I found a pair of sensible winter shoes. I never buy fall or winter appropriate shoes, so this was exciting. I have a zillion pairs of sandals, and then nothing to wear when it gets cold. I really hate shoe shopping.

After a nap, dinner (I made Mongolian beef) and the Heisman award show (Yay for Bradford!!) we put Daphne to bed and left the grandparents in charge while Chris & I went to see Twilight. I know, can you believe I haven’t seen Twilight yet?? Let me just say that I am so glad to have a husband who will take me to chick flicks, art museums, heck, even the opera, just because he knows it will make me happy. Chris did pretty well up until the whole vampire reveal scene. When Edward told Bella that she was like his own personal brand of heroin, Chris absolutely lost it and laughed out loud. Yeah, the movie was a bit hokey. And now I will have to deal with him teasing me about it for at least a week. It started in the parking lot when he told me, “I have something to tell you, Jenny. You are like my own personal brand of smack” and then gave me a smoldering sideways Edward glance. Chris, thanks for taking me to see a teenage vampire movie, when you probably wanted to see the latest Bond.

Oh- and just an update. I haven’t been able to connect to the internet with my laptop, so my time online has been seriously reduced this week. I’ll try to get caught up on blog comments and emails today. So sorry!!!

While we were finishing up some Christmas shopping for Chris’s nephew at The Disney Store yesterday, I noticed that all their Disney Princess baby dolls were 50% off. I immediately picked up a Snow White doll and proclaimed, “We are buying this now!” Daphne is in LOVE with it. She spent at least an hour hugging, kissing, feeding and carrying it all over the house. Which is a record. Normally she doesn’t spend that much time with one toy. Best $9.75 I’ve spent on her so far. Anyway, the only thing I don’t like about the doll is her freakishly large eyes.

Chris mentioned the weird eyes too, and when I told him I thought they looked like Alien eyes he reminded me of this:

Yep. Alien baby from Men in Black. And now I’ll never be able to look at poor baby Snow White the same way again.

It snowed yesterday in Houston. Unfortunately, we didn’t get much here in Katy. Wait, did I say unfortunately?? Scratch that.

According to the Houston Chronicle, the flurries tied a record for Houston’s earliest snowfall ever (Dec 10th, 1944). And I don’t think it’s snowed here since the infamous Christmas 2004 snowfall that left us stranded in Mississippi on our way to Tulsa. That was the year it took us 36 hours and we had a slight (hehehe) detour through Southern Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas to avoid the big ice cube of Arkansas. It was also the last time we attempted to go to Tulsa for Christmas. Hopefully we will have good weather in a little over a week when we hit the road for Oklahoma. Because if it’s snowing and there’s a chance we might get stuck, we are staying put. It was bad enough being stuck in the car for 8 hours outside of Holly Springs, MS in 2004. I can’t imagine being stuck someplace with Daphne in the car.

- While my husband was at Office Max buying a few plastic folders yesterday, the cashier asked him if he’d like to purchase the extended warranty. An extended warranty on plastic folders. Seriously?? (And no, the cashier wasn’t joking.) I wonder if anyone says, “Sure! That sounds like a great idea!”

- I decided to whack about two inches off my bangs. I have never in my life cut my own hair, but I was desperate. Luckily, I have a side swept bang so I didn’t have to cut straight. 2008 has been my year for hair drama. I think I need to go back to my basic bob in 2009. It’s hard to screw that up.

- Daphne wore shorts yesterday. Today the afternoon high will be 43 degrees. I’m going to need bigger closets here if I have to keep both my summer and fall/winter wardrobe out at the same time.

- I’ve spent way too much time with Buddy Guy over the last 48 hours. Between editing Chris’s concert photos of Buddy Guy at the House of Blues and watching the King of Swing episode (starring Mr. Guy) of Jack’s Big Music Show with Daphne, I’ve had my fill of blues guitar. The photos were really frustrating… dark stage, black man, white shirt, white guitar, super bright stage lighting bouncing off white shirt/guitar and creating a reflector, basically. Chris said the other photographers were really frustrated too. I’m not exactly sure how you shoot around that. The good news is the D90 ROCKS at 1600 ISO. Zero noise. Really. I would run Noise Ninja, just in case, and it didn’t find anything. And the 24-70mm f/2.8 lens I bought earlier this year helped too. And back to Jack’s Big Music Show, I always find Buddy Guy’s reaction to singing “Shama-lama-wing-ding” with a bunch of puppets pretty funny. Especially after watching Chris’s video of his concerts when he stops singing and tells everyone else singing along to stop f-ing up his song.

- Do you need gift tags for your Christmas presents? I LOVE these from Angry Chicken. With sayings like, “Don’t get too excited, the box was from something else.” and “Shopping for you is so hard, you should give me an extra gift for even trying. I mean that in a loving way.” Just print the pdf and you are good to go.