The Giver That Can't...Stop...Giving...

Liza and I have been known to partake of nerdy, overachieving homemaker activities. I think this stems from the fact that we are nerdy overachievers.

Last Valentine's Day, for instance, we made heart-shaped boxes and filled them with homemade baked goods for our honeys.

It sounds so simple when I say it that way. But Martha's projects have a seedy underbelly. She provides purposely vague instructions to ensure her supremacy.


[Martha's box, all perfect and beautiful and secretly assembled by tiny minions.]

The boxes took several hours and involved four different craft stores, three different kinds of adhesive, unruly matte board, insufficiently sharp Xacto knives, missing rulers and illegal use of tape, booze and swear words.

The finished products came out lopsided, missing corners, and were at least two inches away from fitting top to bottom. But they were so hard to make that neither one of us will ever throw them away. We're just gonna keep filling them forever. Which turns out to be a godsend in this Year of the Nothing New.


[Mine, covered in distracting patterns and shot at its most flattering angle.]

After protracted discussion about this year's box contents, Liza chose Meyer lemon squares, and I settled on heart-shaped chocolate eclairs from the same February 2007 issue of Living.

The eclairs took several hours and involved two different grocery stores, a traffic jam, three different recipes-within-the-recipe, unruly batter, insufficient planning, missing ice baths and illegal use of fat-free milk, refrigeration and swear words.

I should have known. I did. I'm a sick, sick, nerdy overachiever.

By 10 PM, I had persevered to the last paragraph of the recipe when I read the words "Serve Immediately".

Mother F%&#er.