I hate feeling greedy in the season of giving.

Ho ho ho, tis the season to want to buy stuff. For me.

Who am I kidding, it doesn’t matter what time of year it is, sometimes I get a bee in my bonnet about buying something, and I have to have it, like, now.

Just this year I needed, asap, a tortilla press, popsicle molds, retro kitchen embroidery designs, an external hard drive, new cake pans, a paper shredder, a vegetable juicer, a George Foreman grill, the entire Sookie Stackhouse series of novels, a new DVD recorder, the book Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, a 5 quart covered plastic container that will fit in my refrigerator door (for the artisan bread, of course), a Swiffer Wetjet, a cordless vacuum stick, a red ceramic pie plate, and most recently a new flagpole and house flags.

Most of these things I could easily live without, except I obsessed about them a little and either drove to several stores to find them, or spent a LOT of time in the Internet to find just the right one at the right price.

Don’t let me watch infomercials, as I am kind of susceptible to them. Some of those products are good and some I’d rather not remember (steam shark floor cleaner and its brother the Shark cordless sweeper).

I do not like feeling greedy in the season of giving. But I’m spending a lot of time dreaming about my new Kindle. (No I didn’t buy it. Yet.)

I have 64 Christmas CDs

It's like a weird sickness, I know, but I just love Christmas music. And not the same old stuff every year, I am on the lookout for the unusual but good, every year. But I am trying to limit myself to 2 new ones each year because, well, this is getting out of hand.

These come in all genres, some of them even defy a single genre. Jazz? I've got traditional jazz and smooth jazz too. Country? Yeah, some modern country and several western swing style discs too. There's classical and pseudo classical (What if Mozart Wrote I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Clause?). There is one reggae, two tejano and three rockabilly discs.

Twenty years after the original It's Christmas Man!, Brave Combo has a new, live, Christmas album. That's one of my 2 for this year. I wonder what other one will grab me.

Oh, and it's really hard to take a good photo of CDs on the dining table indoors. And it's raining so I couldn't take them out back.

I'm having an odd craving for gingerbread cookies...

I didn't remember I'd seen it before.

The kitchen sink that is.

The backstory is that my sister selected a light fixture for her guest bathroom that is the same as the one in our brother's/sister-in-law's guest bathroom. She didn't make the connection, she just knew when she saw it in the store that it was THE ONE.

I did the exact same thing with his kitchen sink. When I picked mine out I drove 30 miles away to Ft. Lauderdale to the European sink outlet store and spent hours looking at all the sinks before finding just the right one: stainless steel, 2 bowls, the left one being bigger and deeper, and the right one being smaller and easier to reach the bottom of. I've picked out kitchen sinks before but this is the first time I've gone with the one I love rather than the one that fits and is cheap. And I love it.

So, I don't remember seeing it in my brother's kitchen, but I know I must have, because it had been newly remodeled the Christmas of 2006 when I was there, and I bought my sink in June of 2008. I didn't make the connection until I looked under their sink recently and saw the brand name in the inside of the bowl. Blanco. Nice sink.

Now if we could explain why my sister-in-law and I have the same silverware pattern...