Run Run Rudolph

I was asked to come to work early today, around 12:30PM, and work for seven hours. That's fine. I need to make up the hours lost that dead week after Thanksgiving, and the morning and early afternoon shifts have lost several cashiers lately - two women are out on disabilities with a broken foot and a bad back (and the one with the back may not be able to return), and one woman apparently came in, felt sick, and ended up leaving very early. Work was steady-to-dead, to real problems other than that lack of help. As two other co-workers pointed out during my break, it probably won't be really busy until Sunday and Monday, when people leave the malls and start buying their Christmas dinners and all the little things they forgot the week before.

This did mean I had to rush the things I planned for today a bit. I did my biscotti this morning. I found the recipe in the Italian Farmhouse Cookbook, by Susan Hermann Loomis. To be honest, many of the recipes in this book are a little complicated for me or require items I can't easily find, but I've made the simple biscotti recipe for Christmas since about 2003. Instead of making them into the hard rusks most people dunk into hot drinks, I roll them into candy cane and wreath/ornament shapes and sprinkle them with colored sugar and hot cinnamon candies. They're wonderfully crunchy with a hint of sweetness...and they still taste great dunked in tea.

I also made a very fast trip to the Oaklyn Library on my bike to return Annabelle's Wish (it's due tomorrow, but I won't have the time to return it then) and drop off the Silly Putty I bought at Target on my Christmas shopping trip with Amanda in the library's Toys For Tots box.

Amanda and I started doing Toys For Tots the year after we started doing our shopping trip. Amanda has no very young relatives, and she wanted to buy toys...so why not do it for a less-fortunate child? I loved the idea, and I've tried to do it whenever I can find a box every year since.