This morning was crisp, cold, and partly cloudy… which made it a good time to do a little photography in the town we call home. I took a walk to ***Independence Park|http://gallery.prwdot.org/independence_park***. This park is just a short walk down the street from our apartment. It runs along Lothrop Street in Beverly, and has a beach facing the Atlantic Ocean. The most “lovely” feature, I feel, is the excellent view of the PG&E coal-burning power plant across the harbor in Salem. I also made up a panoramic shot of the park, beach, and ocean, which you can see at the end of the photo gallery, or view ***here|http://prwdot.org/mov/independence_park.mov***, in QuickTime VR format,(4.5 megabytes), if you have a relatively fast connection and an up-to-date version of QuickTime.

While I was gone, Becky started whipping up some cookie dough, and when I returned, we made some cookies with this nifty cookie press we got. You stick all the dough in a tube, and then hook up a caulk-gun like attachment to it, with a metal plate of sorts on the top. Squeeze the trigger, and the dough is pressed through the plate, creating a cookie in that plate’s particular pattern. This got me to thinking – in TV commercials nowadays, you see parents and children “making cookies” with the pillsbury dough-in-a-tube, or even more recent, the pre-made-dough-bits-in-a-sheet…. just break ’em and bake ’em! I see a day coming where children will watch old movies and ask, “Why are they mixing all of that goop in the bowl? Why don’t they go down to the hypermart and buy ConGlomCoEZBakeSheetz like you do, daddy?” I mean, I’m sure those things taste just as good as cookies made from scratch, but come on – it’s not too much more effort to make up your own batch of dough!

There was a point somewhere in all of that, but I’m sure it’s long since forgotten.

In any case, I hope your holiday season is shaping up to be a joyful one.