Birthday Fairy?

I am not a Material Girl, but still. Have you seen these Polish pottery pieces with the tiny handpainted designs? Have you seen them? Coming soon to a kitchen near me.

***

In all seriousness, the stock market's roller coaster is in that deep pitched, scream-aloud plunge that might ordinarily cause me to shrug my shoulders and move on to the next project. As a recovering news junkie, I don't even turn the news on unless it's after all children are fed, dressed, played with, read to, fed and re-dressed, encouraged to play outside, fed again, taught a little, ordered to do their chores and then put to bed (whee). The news of late (the past six or seven years?) has been mostly depressing to me. I am afraid to get sucked back into old habits of checking the news wire every ten minutes, living and breathing the AP updates.

I find that sort of devotion to the news unhealthy, even if one is paid to behave so.

Lately I spend much more time "living in the moment," hanging laundry on the line and putting up jam, as it were. I've said here that the economic crisis boggles me. Then, the other night, I was easily pulled back over to the dark side by a late-night report on the evils of the subprime mortgage market and its secret sister who's been kept in the basement... the "swap." These swaps comprise trillions of dollars of insurance taken out in case the subprime market went south (nah, that'll never happen)... and now there's no regulation of the "swap" market, and no way to count how many dollars further in crisis we're plunging as a nation, no, as a WORLD.

Does anyone else just want to go back to baking pies?