Thanks Alane for the compliment on The Table. Please post recipes. . .pretty soon I will have used up my whole bag of tricks and will be posting how to make peanut butter and mortadella sandwiches.

In the discussion of Giada vs Nigella. . .Giada and my crazy next door neighbor could be twins so I can't handle watching it. . .would be throwing the cast iron skillet at the TV. . .and I haven't any idea who Nigella is. . .so I guess I get a "time out" under The Table for having no clue.

Joe is having veal parmigiana for supper and I am having Spaghetti alla Carbonara di Parma Arrabbiata thanks to Joe's generosity. Proscuitto di Parma is $23 a pound now. If I had known that when he called me on the cell phone to tell me he had driven all over Omaha and finally found it, I would have said, 'skip it!' I have divided the slab up in to 5 meal sized portions: glad the recipe only calls for 1/4 pound! I am spoiled rotten, aren't I?

And thanks to the family for the Christmas cards and the huge surprise it contained (Joe doesn't tell me anything, obviously! He just comes home and collapses after his ten and twelve hour days.) I would send out cards to the rest of the family in the Dish, but Airport Guy is a bit tied up with work and hasn't updated the database I use to mail merge into Publisher to make labels. (It's the only program that lets me add my own images to the labels.) Okay, so Emily Post would bust a gasket over using the computer to address the cards, but that is what being a geek is all about, right? And it makes the post office happy.

I would happily live somewhere I never saw snow again. Tarka, our snow dog, would be unhappy, but I would be thrilled. If you ever saw me jogging in the snow it would be the end of the world as we know it. . .So enjoy that balmy weather in Florida for me, too, please.