Did you know fondue can FAIL?

I had no idea. 
I thought it would be fool-proof to melt cheese into wine.

Turns out, [thank you Internet] 
the cheese can "seize" in the acids of the wine and simply melt into a rubbery lump.
Which mine did--in full view of the dinner party guests I was making it for.

Upside: 
we laughed so hard, the failed fondue provided more pleasure than a successful one would have.

And we did manage to scoop up and eat the melty cheese before it got too rubbery. (It tasted great.)

I am making pot roast for Christmas Eve dinner tomorrow, which I have done several years in a row.
I use my mother's recipe. She was something of a gourmet, but she swore by Lipton's dried onion soup mix as the perfect seasoning, sprinkled on the roast, which is then baked slowly in a bottle of cheap red wine.
Knock on wood, nothing has ever gone wrong with it.

I've been in such a great mood the past few months. That began with starting to darn the holey blanket and progressed with Bear Repair. Often I go to bed thinking about some technical problem––lately, how to work with jointed limbs––and wake up eager to get to it.

The only problem is that my apartment is covered in sewing scraps and bears in various stages of reincarnation, like 
< these five (from c. 1960–1980). 
The problem being, they will have to shove over to make room for six of us (humans, that is) on Xmas Eve.

All five of these bears arrived flat and dirty, all are now clean and fluffy again.
I could just re-stuff them and and call them done.
But I've become much more interested in altering them, even just a bit...
This takes me a lot of time, which is happy-making too. I wouldn't want to just whip through them---it's nice to spend time musing on what they might be.