we had an unopened bottle of eggnog which i had bought last month for a party and finally figured out a way to use it. what do you get when you mix coffee with eggnog?

eggnog latte. add some milk and nutmeg too if you would like. you should try it…tastes like starbucks.

i came across this blog which is entirely devoted to hyde park. take a look if you want to know more about our hood! its reflections on the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of living in hyde park seem pretty accurate in most places. this is a photo of the downtown skyline from hyde park (…not our apartment). http://hydeparkprogress.blogspot.com

it was time to put away the christmas tree, but our closet was already quite full. i was kind of amazed at how much stuff we had accumulated over a year. in particular, the number of bags i had recycled…it really didn’t look that way inside the closet.

hello i am the little man on ms. sherwin’s tokidoki bag. mr. joe brought me from hong kong. do you like me?

our local grocery store is closing. we’ve had a love-hate relationship with it; the Hyde Park Co-op Market, aka the Co-op, had served Hyde Park for over 70 years and at one point had three stores. we’ve relied on it for all our meats and non-produce goods, while fresh produce was always too expensive (luckily there’s a good little produce market close by). a fresh tomato might cost you an arm and a leg, but you could always find some brand of icecream on sale. it’s also where we’ve always dropped off our recyclable materials in the always overflowing (tiny) bins, and yet would always go home amazed at the degree of double-bagging. hopefully a new supermarket will fill it’s place soon…in the meantime we may need to go vegetarian until we find somewhere else to buy our meat.

for new year’s day, we fulfilled our snow shoveling duties for church. unfortunately the snow blower wasn’t working so we had to do it the old-fashioned way, but at least it was good exercise!