Today for the Thursday Thirteen...

Thirteen things I put in the cookies I made today:

• red and green candied cherries
• vanilla
• light brown sugar
• cinnamon
• freshly ground black pepper
• ginger
• 4 eggs
• white sugar
• unsalted peanuts
• flour
• salt
• canola oil
• baking soda

I don't count the hair that tried to make it's way in there too. I pulled it out while it was still on the side of the mixing bowl.

Today for Thursday Thirteen... Why I still don't have my Christmas tree or any decorations up...

1. I feel like road kill after having failed the road test, my (well meaning and caring but overly loud) brother and my birthday all in one day yesterday.

2. I don't have the energy, no I don't have the ambition, to find everything.

3. Sometimes it is too much like going through the dead and wishfully buried to look at all that old stuff when looking back seems better than the here and now.

4. Maybe I'm just getting too old for Christmas.

5. Maybe I can just admire other decorations and trees from afar and leave all mine in mothballs.

6. Maybe my Christmas tradition is to buy a new tree ornament and keep everything wrapped up and packed away, in some box or other.

7. It seems too much like the never ending ordeal of moving to have to find all those boxes and unpack them.

8. Maybe I can just procrastinate one more day...

9. I have to get ready to go to work in a couple of hours.

10. At this rate Christmas will be over soon anyway.

11. No one but me will be here to see the tree and decorations, I could just lie and say I had them all up and then took them all down right after the 25th. Let them deal with that.

12. I know I will never find that one angel my Mom bought me for my tree and I just don't want to finally look through the last box and have to admit she (the ornament) is gone forever.

13. My Dad was an electrical engineer, all those little lights and plugs really do give me the creeps, once mildly electrocuted, twice... umm..... severely phobic.

Thursday Thirteen - A list about romantic notions. I've been listening to romantic crooning CDs for hours. Sometimes I do miss being married, part of a couple.

1. A soft song in my ear while we dance to the slow songs.

2. A tiny bouquet, as a surprise, on my desk.

3. A drawing of fantastical things like dragons, castles and queens. Made just for me.

4. A sexy wink and a grin when he catches me watching him do something manly like shaving, chopping wood, you get the idea.

5. One single really scrumptious and decadent chocolate on my pillow. (Note, not ice cream!)

6. A love poem, especially if it's so awful it makes me laugh.

7. When I'm in the shower he steps in to scrub my back and then wash my hair.

8. In bed, he wraps his arm around me, only a little possessive and yet really nice and snuggly.

9. Holding hands while out walking outside in the dark of night.

10. Sneaking a kiss when holding the door open.

11. He knows all the words to My Funny Valentine.

12. He remembers something I told him a week ago even though it wasn't vitally important.

13. Staying up all night, just talking about everything and anything.

If you could pick any super hero power (speed, telepathy, immortality, freezing, fire-breathing, shapeshifting, and so on) what would it be? Now write about your own adventures as super hero. Or, would you be a hero at all? Maybe you would choose to be a super villain instead. Either way, write yourself an adventure to remember.

From BlogTalkers:

Motivated by the fear of harassment claims, many companies now prohibit men and women from meeting one-on-one inside of offices or conference rooms that do not have a window to an outside hallway or area where others can see into the room. What do you think about that? Good move because it protects everyone involved, or an unwarranted overreaction driven by nothing more than overreaching morals and fear?

Kind of a nice swing back to old fashioned respect for each other I think. Part of me thinks it is silly that men can't be expected to behave. After all, why should women be kept in quarantine just because we are female.

Yet, men have proven that only some of them do have control over their own morals. So, maybe a throw back to old fashioned ways is not a bad idea. We already keep children confined to school buses and getting rides to and from school. We don't let them go out on their own as easily as we once would have. That is interesting as the old fashioned way was not to think much about what the kids were doing, their safety.

Anyway, I'm kind of undecided and yet I can see that it might have a good point. It might bring back more old fashioned traditions.

Anything is possible.