Binge Watching "Stranger Things"

 

November has been swallowed by my cookie dough making and then my cookie dough baking.

It's my annual contribution to our house's gift to the associates - all departments - and the other sisters in other local communities who live here in this big building.

I have made 16 different batches of cookie dough:

1. Amish Raisin Cookies

2. Date Walnut Cookies

3. Magic Cookie Bars

4. Candy Bar Hersheys Cookies

5. Potato Chip Cookies

6. Molasses Sugar Cookies

7. Butter Cookies

8. Oatmeal Gems

9. Peanut Butter Cookies

10. Dream Cookies

11. Cranberry-White Chocolate Cookies

12. Russian Teacakes

13. Blueberry and White Chocolate Ginger Cookies

14. Apricot Almond Chews

15. Cinnamon Pecan Toffee Cookies

16. Snickerdoodles

I have now baked 11 batches.  Trying to get most of them baked and in the freezer before my students' papers and finals roll in.

Besides the baking, I have become addicted to the Netflix series  "Stranger Things." I watch one episode each night,  well, most nights.  It's gripping and gruesome and middle school melodramatic, with truly gluey monsters.   More on that another time.

I tried to post some photos from the tv show, but the computer won't allow me.

some remarks about "Stranger Things" from the New York Times reviewer:

"One of the first season’s best ideas, in which a 12-year-old trapped in an alternate dimension used his family’s Christmas lights to communicate, is consciously recycled.

Other repetitions are less explicit but just as noticeable. A major plotline set in the past is integral to the season’s mysteries but also seems designed, in a fan-friendly way, to present the actress Millie Bobby Brown as often as possible in the childlike haircut and costume that defined her in Season 1. The exasperated byplay between the odd-couple friends Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Steve (Joe Keery) is still amusing, but it has become so formulaic that you are likely to tune it out.

And yes, there’s plenty of time in these episodes, which average more than an hour and a quarter, to think about things like that.

...Back in Hawkins, Ind., the town that sits over the Upside Down — the literal home of other-dimensional monsters and the metaphorical receptacle for the stereotypically middle-American sorrows and regrets that the monsters exploit — the remaining characters begin to detect the emergence of the latest creature.

Season 4 continues a progress away from the heightened, delicate emotionalism and wry humor of a Spielberg-style fable and toward the guilt, dread and body terror associated with Brian De Palma and David Cronenberg. It’s a logical move — the particular magic of the first season was probably impossible to maintain — but it doesn’t play to the brothers’ strengths."