After realizing when attempting to do my year-end recap that I could barely remember anything I hadn't blogged about, I'm going to try posting every day for a while. My own personal NaBloPoMo.

Work has been slow so far this week, for which I am grateful. To be totally honest, while I will do what I need to do, I would not mind at all if work continues to be slow for the next two months until kid #2 arrives.

I joined the office lottery pool. My share will be about $38 million when we all win the lottery. I wasn't going to join in, but I pictured coming in next week and finding that everyone else was in Hawaii.

My two home projects for today were baking and organizing the freezer. I made a double batch of rugelach dough in preparation for Christmas baking and candymaking, but since I got sick, none of the holiday treats happened. Now I have lots of dough that I need to use up. I made a half-batch the other night with just cinnamon sugar, raisins, and walnuts. I liked it, K didn't. More for me. (Actually, I ended up eating most of them.) Tonight's were pinwheel-shaped with apricot jam. I thought they were too jammy and sticky, and the shapes weren't quite right. JW liked them better than the first batch. K hasn't tried them yet. I think I'll do a half-batch with chocolate, and maybe one with almond paste.

The freezer has been bothering me ever since we moved in. Everything was in a jumbled pile. We didn't know what we had and what we needed, and I could never find anything without pulling out the entire contents of the freezer. 

I bought a bunch of plastic shoeboxes and had a vision of separating the frozen foods according to type -- one box for frozen veggies, one for fruit, one for meat, one for baked goods, one for starches, one for prepared foods. In reality, only the baked goods fit into a single shoebox, and the boxes themselves took up so much room that I couldn't fit everything back in. I also discovered that we had lots of duplicate veggies, and that the door was taken up by about twenty cold packs. These are the "after" pictures -- I got rid of all but two cold packs and ended up putting the meat in the door. Fruit and veggies are in bins on the bottom shelf. Two stacked shoeboxes on the top contain starches and baked goods, and the prepared foods are shoved in however they'll fit on the side. It's not ideal, but it's a step in the right direction. (I didn't really take these pictures intending to share them with the world -- I took them so I could puzzle over how to organize better without thawing out all our food.)

Today I also started making a dent in our pile of magazines. I read about a Harvard researcher who wrote a book about the evolution of the skull. In the course of his research, he did all sorts of experiments to try to understand how various parts of the body worked.  One of the experiments was to figure out the impact of different kinds of shoes on our bodies and behaviors. They constructed high-heeled shoes and put them on sheep, and then they made the sheep walk on a treadmill. He said that it worked a lot better when the sheep were also wearing socks. Grad students really are underpaid.

While I am chronicling minutiae, two other things that happened in the last two days: Yesterday I talked CT's brother out of applying to law school. I thought their parents would be upset because they were the ones pushing for law school, but CT told me they were grateful once they understood that law school is no longer a safe backup option for aimless college grads. And the day before, K showed me his drawing of a mouse, with blue and red lines all over it. "Is that the fur?" I asked. "No, these blue lines are the veins, and the red lines are the arteries." He pointed to some shapes in the middle of the mouse and said, "This is the stomach. Here are the lungs." He hadn't drawn a face. Recently he's been asking questions about what animals look like on the inside and whether they have the same organs as us.