It’s been a good day for vegetating here in the remote fortress of Tildebunkport. It rained all day til it changed over to snow in the early afternoon and now we’ve gotten our first serious snowfall of 2006, just in time for 2007. 

We’ve been too unmotivated today to have a sit down dinner around a table, and yet not lazy enough to eat directly from the cooking pot while standing over the kitchen sink, so we’ve settled on the middle ground of grazing, all afternoon and evening, as we go from Twilight Zone marathon on the Sci-Fi channel to reading Bush family biographies to playing Knights of the Old Republic for a few hours then turning to the Marx Brothers marathon on TCM.

Today’s grazing fare has included: another round of Ingebretsen’s Swedish meatballs (we get about 8 lbs of meatball mix from Ingebretsen’s each year; roll it all up into meatballs and have one batch on Christmas Eve; freeze the rest to have on New Year’s Eve), with garlic mashed skin-on red potatoes, a nice big bowl of salad greens tossed with a raspberry vinaigrette, and cranberry oatmeal cookies.

I’ve been lying, sluglike on a couch in the living room for a couple of hours reading Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. If I should get tired of KK’s prose stylings (hasn’t happened yet — she’s really not too bad a writer) I also have Kevin Philiips’ American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush close at hand. Riveting reading that demands a strong stomach and, not insignificantly, the ability to fight down one’s rising gorge in the face of so much arrogance and pathological secretiveness. Yeah, they’re monsters, all of them, from charming runt of the litter Neilsie to uber harpie grandma Bar. With reading matter like this, guess I picked the wrong night to stop drinkin’, but I already had my 4 oz. limit of beer for the week out in Eagan yesterday after Ollie Ox’s most excellent blogging workshop/skull session.

As we bid a hearty good riddance to 2006, I offer a roundup of nifty links gleaned in the past two days’ lazy surfing, but first: more shots of the magical wonderland that is Chez Tild, plus the recipe for a truly vile Norwegian “delicacy” (shudder) called fattigmand. Keep your rising- gorge suppression skills handy; you’re gonna need them. Ready? Then onward we plunge.

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The Wall o’ Beatles in the family room. R-L: posters for A Hard Day’s Night, Let It Be, and Help!. On the far left is my favorite:a Hard Day’s Night poster from Poland.

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My kitchen is decorated in Early Fruit Crate Label. With a touch of Flour Sack — “Minnesota Girl” and “Miss Minneapolis” brands of flour.

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Here’s a close up: I especially like the Sleepy Eye Brand egg crate label with the portrait of Chief Sleepy Eye.

The box on the shelf says Climax Thick Tobacco. My mother’s home town up in Minnesota’s Red River Valley got its name from the brand of chewing tobacco that the farmers bought at the local post office. Climax Tobacco company marked each plug of tobacco with a little metal pin or marker that the farmers would leave pinned to the post office wall after they bought their plugs o’ chaw. Eventually the walls were covered with the little metal Climax Tobacco markers and everybody started calling it the Climax post office; then the whole town became known as Climax. The perfect name for a region that also had a town called Fertile, thus spawning a century of lame jokes such as “Valley Newspaper headline: “Fertile Woman Has Baby In Climax” etc etc ad nauseum. Oh those wacky Norwegians.

Ooh — time to go watch the ball drop. I’ll add to this post in the morning.

Happy New Year everybody!