Tonight, I am baking cookies. I am also doing laundry and checking email and trying to clean up the house a little bit because things are starting to pile up in places, and also trying to catch up on all the reading for the bible study (this week it's about 40 chapters of Genesis – or at least the part that deals with Abraham and Sarah and all his descendants – all about how a bunch of people lied and cheated and tricked and got rewarded for it. Yeah, I'm cynical).

Mainly, however, I am trying very hard to pretend that the election didn't really happen, here in California, and that when I wake up tomorrow morning somehow the general public will have found at least one working brain cell and this election didn't really end up in such a complete and utter disaster. Really, I should know better by now. After all, I need only look toward the White House at the Shrub to get evidence to how short in supply working brain cells really are.

But I digress. I am baking cookies. This is because at the very first session someone (okay, it was me) thought it would be an incredibly spiffy idea to have theme snacks. The first session was pretty easy, since it was all about how the bible is made up of different types of writing (so I brought a snack you could build out of layers, because the bible has layers. Like a parfait. And speaking of parfait I think I need to see that movie again). This week, however, the theme is covenant, and frankly, short of baking something that would require me to use an oven mitt to remove it from the oven (because oven mitt rhymes with covenant. Shut up. *You* come up with a better idea!), I was at a loss. Finally I hit upon making Mexican wedding cakes (also known as Russian tea cakes and probably a whole host of other names but basically they're butter and powdered sugar and nuts and flour all rolled into little powdered sugar-covered lumps and they are really good) because a wedding is a sort of covenant and why in the name of all that's holy did I think that theme snacks would be a good idea?

I had dinner with my mom tonight while Richard was off volunteering at the library and that was fun, because we had a chance to talk and laugh and eat virtuous salads, followed by decidedly unvirtuous desserts. And then I swung by the grocery store and picked up walnuts for the cookies (which reminds me – I am not allowed to buy any more nuts no matter how badly I think I need them because there are now three half-empty bags of them in the freezer, ensconsed next to the umpteen half-used packages of mozzerella cheese, all of which I keep forgetting I have) and a can of pumpkin because it is October and thus the season for pumpkin spice cake for breakfast, and now I am home. With the cookies. And the laundry. And oh yeah. That stupid election.