Merry Christmas!

A very quiet day here in soggy Arizona, but nice.

I'm finally setting up the new laptop I bought for myself over a month ago!  Yesterday as I was trying to order photo cards my old laptop shut down on me three different times, signaling it had really, really had enough of this life. 

I'm looking forward to not having to worry about whether or not the plug is in just so to make the connection so it could actually charge the battery.  This kind of thing is to be expected when a laptop has been dropped repeatedly on that same corner -- I'd say it's bad luck, but it's physics: that's where the battery is, so it would always land there.  I hope to do much better with this machine, especially since I won't be travelling with young kids who need more supervision, thereby causing me to rush and forget, say, to zip up my laptop case completely. 

This year's duck confit cassoulet was a major success, so much so that there is none left!  But, I have more duck, saucissons de Toulouse, and roast pork to put together another one, probably for dinner tomorrow?  I don't see anyone complaining.  Confit-ing the duck took forever yesterday in a very slow oven, but it paid off in deliciousness and extra duck fat for next time.  We're going to have potatoes fried in duck fat with our rib roast Christmas dinner this evening.

Said roast is resting in its salt at the moment.  I'm not entirely sold on how I'm going to cook it, and since I only do it once a year, I always have to look it up!  Fortunately it's pretty hard to ruin as long as I don't overcook it!

New keyboard feels pretty good.  I just have to get everything ported over to this new machine and that's going to take a while.  Fortunately Carbonite will just keep chugging along in the background until it's done. 

I haven't done a bit of my school work, but I've got quite a lot of vacation still left.  One of these days I'll be disciplined and tackle it, but with all the shopping and wrapping and cooking, it didn't make sense to try to do it before today.   I'm debating how strict I need to be with myself, because I got books for Christmas and if I start reading...