Gloria, in egg-shell-seas Deo!

Today's title includes the phonetic spelling given by Nadine our choir director (or whoever wrote out “Angels We Have Heard On High” for the kids to practice and sing in our church for next Sunday's Christmas program for the word “excelsis” in the chorus. “Glo-ooooooooooooooo ria, in excelsis Deo!” (By the way, that's Latin for “Glory to God in the highest!”) One of Usborne Books' sticker books is actually a collection of basic Latin; I do wonder who'd buy that other than out of sheer curiosity … oh wait, the key word here is “sticker”, and my kids love stickers.

At the vendor show in Berthold my business partner Tara and I got to this Saturday, we got to meet a good variety of people and get word out not only about Shaklee ourselves but also learned about others and get to have some fun. And we ate well too … there was pizza, there was bacon and corn chowder, there was chili, there was more coffee than I expect I should have drunk (and I kept trying to get out of hot water dispensers for mixing tea and hot chocolate), and throughout the day we have raffles and I won a standing glass snowman and bought a homemade Max ornament for our Christmas tree.

(I'd already won the Grinch ornament last year.) I just read on Facebook that every time you open a book a tree smiles knowing there is life after death. In that case, I have made a lot of trees smile over the last week, the last month, the last year … in reverse order ('cause I've delayed writing on some of these and I really don't feel like elaborating on them – unless I want to) I've finished reading Donald J. Sobol's Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective (ISBN 9780142408889), which you probably remember as a kid as a variety of mysteries and you get the answers in the back and you figure them out.

Still fun, and I actually got two out of the ten right, better than my middle school average for those things! Matt Sturges, Kelly Yates, and Brian Shearer's graphic novel take on the Eleventh Doctor in Doctor Who: A Fairytale Life (ISBN 9781613770221) has the time traveler and his companion Amy solving the disappearance of medieval children on a recreation planet, while Anthony Bourdain, Joel Rose, and Langdon Foss present in the graphic novel Get Jiro! (ISBN 97814101228279) a near-future where the food wars are taken very seriously. Heck, a chef could kill a bad diner and no one would bat an eye.

Bourdain you might recognize as the chef and host of No Reservations – and yeah, one can see this version of Goodfellas meeting Top Chef happening the more tribulated (it's English, and as my son told me yesterday I was “smart in English” while Martha was “glamorous”, I'll make it work) our world gets and the more obsessed with good taste over good form. And as I close out today's installment of what is happening in my life, I hope to see on my now broken cell phone some sensational news. I've got invites to send out, excitement to convey, and sensations to convex.

Again, I'll make it work.

David