There is only another few days of the holiday eating blitzkrieg. A New Year's party at our house and then a burlesque party downtown, tomorrow.
When we got home from our Christmas trip today, we weighed ourselves and this is how we felt:
Nothing at all like when, on Saturday, our Scuba instructor took me back to the wet suit rack, looked me up and down and announced "SMALL". I was thrilled. Tom just shook his head, knowing he'd have to hear me relive that moment endlessly. Never you no mind that it took me a half hour to get in the thing (longer when it was already wet from the last dive). I couldn't bend my arms and my gate had this kinetic Parkinsonian thing going...by not being able to bend my knees, I'd somehow just get momentum. At one point I fell down in the surf, wearing all my gear, and simply could not get back up. I think the shame from that, and the crowd that watched, drove me to the next size up. Still, the moment will always be mine. Small. Sigh.
The scuba school, where we went for 5 advanced dives (navigation, naturalist, deep water, drift and peak performance) made us fill out a lot of forms. At some point, with Tom's contact info, in case of emergency, it asked "Relationship:". I wrote "Hostage".
We blame these people, mostly. Our British expat friends, Tony and Emma, are hellaciously good hosts and chefs. Christmas dinner lasted something like 9 hours. It was like being hobbits, what with lunch, second lunch, tea, dinner, sevensies and supper, each with a dessert in between, all blended into one giant, crazy-perfect meal. I remember hugging my final eating effort for the night, a butter cream cupcake and insisting, "It's not you, it's me. I just can't go on."
These are potatoes grilled in rendered duck fat. Uh, yum. 
My plate from just round 1. I think we jiggled the camera because we were hyperventilating.
A flaming yorkshire pudding...was that the dessert for supper or sevensies....it's all a happy gastronomic blur now. Clearly, heavy cream had to be liberally applied to squelch the fire.
Tom and I went to chocolate school for the last few weekends and built these. At dinner (or was it second tea?), we smashed them with a hammer and everybody gobbled them up. The chocolatiere kept asking if I was a chef, he was so impressed with my chocolate handling skills. I didn't want to admit that, like Mary Tyler Moore, I hadn't been "around" (chocolate) so much as "nearby". Let's just say it's a medium I'm happy to work with. Can you imagine if he'd given me a "small" apron and then asked if I was a chef?
This is actually a puppy. Not even a year old. He is doing bad things to Santa. We, Huckleberry and I, happen to weigh the exact same number of kilograms. If you could see him in real life, you'd want to curl up in a ball and cry too. Tony, his dad, told us that you aren't supposed to overfeed a great dane puppy or they'll grow too fast and it will cause them physical harm. There's a lesson in there somewhere?
Between our many feedings at our friends', we hit up places like Max's at the Red Hill Estates Winery. When they put it on one big platter, six gourmet desserts almost seems appropriate.
We didn't do a lot with gifts and traditional holiday hustle bustling this year...just really enjoyed being here and with the people we were with. I know that Melbourne feels like home to me, but really, Tom is my home. That's what I meant when I wrote "hostage", I just didn't want to get all emotionally squishy on a scuba folder.
We reviewed New Years resolutions from last year and did a lot of "ditto on that one", "and that"...
And our lifelong dreams of wearing paper crowns was realized. It was a great, great Christmas.
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