christmas candy and the early hnt from guam ...

One of the things that, to me, is synonymous with Christmas is homemade candy.

My mom is one of those midwest/southern type old-school moms, which means she can cook and bake like nobody's business. The holidays are all about food for my family, and baking is a big part of that — homemade bread, cakes, pies, and a ton of different cookies — peanut butter, chocolate chip, macademia nut, snickerdoodles, sugar cookies (omigod those rocked!), gingersnaps to DIE for ... not to mention a whole bunch of other things like snicker cookie bars and what not.

But it also was the time when my mom MADE candy. At home. Fuuuuuuuuuck.

If you've never had homemade candy, damn you've missed out. Seriously. My mom rocked the candy-making. At halloween, she'd make caramel apples. Ten times better than anything store bought, though someone once sent me some killer gourmet caramel and candy apples once.

Anyway, mom had two super specialties.

The first is peanut brittle. Man this stuff is soooooooo good! Hard and crunchy and crispty and peanutty. How do you beat that? Today a box came in from mom, her Christmas present to me. She sent me some pistachios, because she knows those are one of my faves, as well as some honey roasted peanuts. PLUS ... two clear plastic boxes FILLED with peanut brittle! wooooohoooo!! I am a happy son! I will bring some into the office to hook up a few select friends.

The second is fudge. God I love fudge. It's the ultimate in chocolate, as far as I'm concerned. It's so very rich and decadent and delightful and dreamy and ... *sigh* ... mom didn't send any fudge this Christmas. It is a bit of a bitch to mail from the states, because it takes so long to get here and tends not to do well in heat. But damn ... fudgeless ... will need to score some somewhere! LOL

The early HNT from Guam...
OK ... so I got a little over-enthusiastic with the shaving cream. It's what happens when you need to shave the ENTIRE head. LOL

Random Guam Fact Of The Day:
One of the Christmas traditions on Guam is the making, and eating, of boñelos dagu — yam donuts. The yams are actually very caustic when raw, they can really irritate skin when they're being ground down to go into the batter; many people wear rubber gloves while doing it. They're dropped into hot, hot oil in little blobs and come out in an orb shapes. Once cooled down, they are dipped into little saucers that hold maple syrup. Yummy!!

QUESTION ...
How many of you guys are seeing my sidebar all the way down at the bottom? besides E.N. and grainne? And what OS and browser are you using?

I see it fine on the side, in Safari, Netscape and Explorer, but I guess that's not the case with everyone.

Also ... if you do see it on the bottom and know anything about html coding, can you take a look at my source code and tell me what's fucked up? LOL

grainne seems to think it's something to do with the DZERette button I added, but the code seems OK to me ... at least it does now. LOL