So last night my mom told me about a web site where you can sign up to have Santa call your kids. Apparently you fill out a form with all sorts of info, like what they want for Christmas, any pets you have, their friends names and anything else you'd like Santa to talk about. She said she'd heard about it on the radio and the Santa sounded amazing and the kids freaked out. So I went to check on it, and it was pretty cool. And then I thought, who actually owns a web site named www.santa-claus.com? So I looked and had to laugh. It appears that Santa is incorporated these days and located on Convention Drive in Las Vegas, Nevada. Doesn't it figure? Maybe he moved there for the weather, or maybe the idea of being able to see Celine Dion every night of the year was just too tempting to pass up.

I awoke this morning to the sound of Green Day wafting up through every vent in our house. My son is taking drum lessons, and he got a drum set this weekend, so now he puts on Green Day and plays along - at six in the morning. I went downstairs and gave him a standing ovation, then poured myself a nice tall glass of egg nog - nector of the gods (albeit gods with high cholesterol and more fat grams before 7am than should be consumed all week).

I love egg nog and can't understand anyone who doesn't just dig the stuff. While the name itself is enough to turn someone off (an egg, I know what that is, but what's a nog?), who can resist such a creamy confection? Well, my kids, to start. They practically scream every time I suggest they try a sip of my egg nog. Much like the reaction I got two nights ago when I had a brain storm and decided to make them chicken pot pies for dinner (is that the pie thing? they wanted to know, we don't eat pie things). I told them it was soup in a bowl made of bread, and then forced them to eat it (my kids also can't even stomach the idea of mayonaise, so last summer when my mom tried to pass off a turkey with mayo sandwich on my son he freaked out and practically ran away - she told him it wasn't mayonaise, it was bread spread, and hoped she could put one over on him. It didn't work).

So this morning as I downed a half gallon of egg nog, I shook my head at all the yummy things my kids were missing out on. I mean, where'd they learn to act like that? And then I remembered a time in college when I was babysitting for a family and made myself a tuna sandwich with some tuna in the frige. Well, one bite into this sandwich, and I almost had to call poison control. I quickly picked up the phone, dialed my friend Vicki who'd babysat the day before.

"Did you make this tuna?" I asked her.
"Yep," she told me.
"What's wrong with it," I wanted to know, on the verge of keeling over dead right there on the kitchen floor.
"I put in a little mustard," she told me.
Mustard!!! I hate mustard. Can't stand it. Even a little pinch on my tuna sandwich is enough to gross me out.
So I thought about my reaction to a little mustard and immediately understood the finicky kids dissing my egg nog. But that's okay. All the more for me.

(on a completely different note: when I searched google images for egg nog, the first photo that appeared was a woman in a g-string having egg nog poured over her ass - what's up with that?)

Murder and mayhem for the holidays? Why not! It sure beats fruit cake...

A blend of historical mystery and paranormal fantasy, Tamara Siler Jones delivers a fast-paced, chilling story with THREADS OF MALICE. Here, in her second Dubric Byerly Mystery, a vicious killer stalks the quiet towns of the northern reach, kidnapping and murdering boys. With a score dead and two more missing, can Dubric and his team find the killer before he strikes again? A twisted murderer may not be all Dubric is looking for...or the only evil that he will find.

In this relentlessly gripping thriller, Compton Crook Award winner Tamara Siler Jones weaves together her unique blend of fantasy, forensics and suspense to create a world terrorized by a killer out of our darkest nightmares. Now one man must follow a trail of savaged victims to save an innocent life hanging by the slimmest of hopes.…

One by one, young men in the kingdom’s outer reaches are vanishing into the dark. So far, two bodies have washed up on the local riverbank. But Dubric Byerly, head of security at Castle Faldorrah, soon realizes there are countless more victims…for it’s his curse to be forever haunted by the ghosts of those whose deaths demand justice.

The latest to vanish is Braoin, a seventeen-year-old painter whose mother came to Dubric’s aid when he most needed it. All Dubric knows is that the boy is still alive. But time is running out, and it isn’t only Braoin’s life hanging in the balance. If Dubric can’t untangle the twisted web of clues and lies and find his way to the killer, one of his own pages will be the next to die.…