We stayed up late (for us) watching bad movies and finishing that bottle of champagne. Okay, that was me in that bottle; Alane didn't have much. We started the evening by finally getting to our holiday tradition of greasy fried food. This time we batter-fried big meatloaf-balls, small dill pickles, and reubens.

Yes, reubens. When we last tried that a few weeks ago my roll-ups of pastrami-swiss-kraut could not hold together under the weight of the batter -- it started unraveling in the oil. Last night I got clever: folded a small payload of pastrami and kraut, then rolled it in the slice of swiss. Nuked the roll to make the swiss melt a bit, then slid the whole plate into the refrigerator to firm it all back up. Took the batter nicely and made for a frickin awesome reubenesque fritter that I drowned in thousand island dressing and ate with my deep fried pickled.

Sorry, no photos -- except for Cookie's snapshot of the one leftover pickle.

Did a lot of painting over the holiday week -- the boys' room, the bathroom. Pretty much done with all that. Now I have the doorframes of the upstairs hallway to paint. And all that ripped up carpet and destroyed dresser to dispose of. It's all piled sadly in the garage. Looks a bit like the national economy.

And speaking of market disasters, who knew there was a Garbage Pail Kids movie released in 1987? It was spectacularly awful.