Christmas at work, during the happy celebration that is the Gift Exchange and General Swap Fest and Feast, I won a cookbook and cookie cutters from the gift lottery. That was nice.

The work team goes around admiring packages and wrappings, and during the course of their marauding, the Chief Cook and Bottle Washer of the Gossip Department remarked that now I would be able to bake cookies for staff all of the time, and wouldn't that be great? They hungrily looked at all the yummy photos of treats in the cookie book, but there was no offer to pay for cookie ingredients.

I, as any normal working person would, took that as a passing comment should be taken.

What with all the break-ins in my home, I don't have much time for baking, even if I were in the mood. There is plenty enough baking going on at work, anyway, without my contribution.

The stalker is in my home when I am not: Besides rearranging the arrangement of my spoons in my silverware drawer, stealing a nice cream colored blouse, rifling through my underwear drawer and throwing a lacy bra on the floor, the burglar has tampered with the Spyware on my computer. It's not working. Things have slowed to a snail's pace. There is nothing new to do or see in my house. Even stalkers get bored if you don't give them some new entertainment.

The upshot of all my complaining about the handyman is that, for whatever reason, Tim's Water Company showed up after dark and loosened the cap on the fire hydrant in front of my house.

It was dark outside. Water gushed and flowed profusely down the street. This usually only happens in the summer when the temperature is in the high 90's or above. On television you see kids squeal and giggle as they run through the water and cool off under the sizzling sun.

It is winter now.

I kept thinking of a sexual metaphor, as if there was some buildup of pressure in the deepness of the earth. You know, it's probably a pipe connected to the hydrant. They break all the time, and you see crews of workmen standing in ditches with shovels and other tools, along with exposed pipes. They usually make such a mess that traffic must slow, and you can't help notice how fraught with difficulty it all is.

Do you think the water men are acting from deep psychological impulses? Had they seen some movie where the sultry weather is matched only by some equally sultry female standing on the porch wearing a flimsy cotton dress clinging provocatively to her voluptuous form as she gently dabs at the perspiration beading on her brow? You've seen it, I'm sure. There are several versions of that film.

I thought of Grain's hot little dance from Excalibur, the movie, much like Salome's hot little dance for Herod from the Bible. Look what happened.

Does the handyman have secret and deep, possibly even perverse (in the opinion of the PTA) longings, some strange and unfulfilled, even unrequited cravings that cause him to toss back and forth on his straw mattress in his lair, cravings so demanding that he can not even give words to his urges? This is probably what happened to the Neanderthals.

It is too soon to tell if there will be a change in the water pressure in my home.

The handyman where I live has free rein.

He was downstairs and adjusted my hot water heater. He added "max salt for max electrical flow, a pinch of molasses and just a hint of Mercurochrome". He said it would minimize my need to visit the tanning salon. I never visit the tanning salon. He told everyone he was just joking, but he did add something to the water, because you can see an orange-y goo seeping from the pipes.

He said that he had added a humidifier to my furnace because it was so dry in my house. What does he know about my house? He denies what I said above, but he doesn't know I've called the water company about him.

He drilled a hole in the concrete basement floor and inserted re-bar and later added a kind of chair. He said it was for tying up policemen. He later removed it when I said I would report him for that. He said he was just joking. The drain is still there.

He dug a big hole in the backyard "for a fish pond". It's quite deep, but at least it has no spikes in it. When I saw it, I told him that he could be held legally liable if anyone fell into it. After that he closed the gate.

He told people I was a troublemaker and threw in "We all know what kind of a woman she is" just to seal the deal with some vague insinuation where you could fill in the mental blank with whatever kind of mind you have, if you have one.

This story is a collection of things that did happen. I didn't include the names to eliminate lawsuits. If anyone complains about what I said, I'll say, "Oh, so you're the one!"

Love from the raspberry lip gloss floosie...I am thinking of the silliness of lip gloss. Cosmetic companies in cahoots with advertising agencies convince girls that they can get whatever they want if they wear lip gloss. There are other theories.

I got pregnant a long time ago and was wearing raspberry lip gloss when I developed extraordinary projectile vomiting and started spewing up my orange soda in the morning.

No sooner had it hit the bottom than it made its way back up to the top. I would neatly lean over the plastic lined trash bucket and puke a little puddle in there.

Each morning I would get up and do it all over again for about three months.Then it stopped. I eventually lost it.

I imagined it would be a boy, and I watched him begin to crawl and stand upright and carry his little satchel onto the yellow school bus while I waved a white handkerchief of surrender to education.

And so it was.

Why do people love miniatures so much?

When I was a child, I used to imagine how wonderful it would be to have live, very miniature people under my control. Where in the world did that idea come from? Did I want something to put in the doll house we had, something much more real and chic that the unimaginative plastic pieces they used to include?

The Art Institute of Chicago has a collection of miniature, historically correct rooms of famous places called the Thorne Miniature Rooms. It is almost a voyeuristic experience. You peep into gem-like rooms that look exactly like the originals, except they are tiny. Marie Antoinette would have to be about a fourth the size of Barbie to fit in those rooms.

I've seen movies where people pay to peep into rooms where the people are life size. Can you imagine how much more money they could get for that if the rooms were, oh say, from Versailles with a different clientele?

Had I already read Gulliver's Travels? My mother read to us quite a lot when we were children. I remember the extreme pleasure I felt when she would gather us into a warm clump, open the book and begin to read. It was delicious. It was seductive. It was among the top wonderful things in the world, and I thought just about everything was fascinating, exciting and inviting because I knew so little.

That's just the kind of kid I was, nutty goofy, and laughingly happy. You can look at photographs of me, my sister, and my brother back then, and we are gleaming with smiles, looking for all the world like we could not stop wiggling long enough to have our picture taken. You could say that we were born that way.

These days, with miniature capabilities of cameras, even things that you would not have noticed or things which sound awful, like stink bug eggs, can look ravishingly beautiful.

I am often sad to think that I do not know any children like that now. They are out there somewhere, maybe, but I do not know them. The children I know play video games and whine shrilly often about not getting their own way. They are stage children with stage parents and drains in their constantly aching ears.

At Christmas time, I see Gingerbread Villages, miniature shops and houses for sale. They have snow on the shutters and sparkles and "hobbity" details.

Now, with videos replacing make-believe games, The Haunting of Hell House with a sink full of blood, the slaughtering couch overflowing with gore, the Mad Welder dehydrating the food with his blow torch, Little Man Tate thrown in the trash after an overdose of Ducolax and sundry other soul shriveling fare, I suppose I would whine too.

Our dreams are miniaturized by all these things, but, most often, not in a wonderful way.

I believe in Satan.

Saying that, I have to add that I do not worship him, even though he was once the Angel of Light, Lucifer. Additionally, the word Satan is only one letter off from satin, implying a smooth operator.

Statements like these are inflammatory to a lot of people, because the popular notion of Satan is one of intense evil. People who do not want to make waves do not even get close to a subject like this. Politics and Religion. Oh Bad.

There are lots of finer points of theology with which people are uncomfortable. It is so much easier just to think in terms of Good and Bad, Black and White with No Gray Areas, when in fact, there are some Gray Areas.

For instance, Satan was once God's best friend, his main man, his best boy. How could He have gone so wrong? Or did He secretly know that the the Prince of Light would turn on him?

God knows everything, so he must have had foreknowledge that Satan would fall from grace. One of the finer discussions of theology is about whether Satan chose to be the Prince of devils or really had no choice since all things are foreordained. Buddhists would probably say that God and Satan are ying and yang, forming a complete circle.

It is said that Satan was behind Judas' betrayal. Someone eventually had to play the part of Judas: Satan got the ball rolling, and then Cain killed Abel, and mankind (there's an oxymoron) was on a roll until, eventually, Judas got the part of "Judas".

It is preordained that there would be a Judas, although only a character sketch was given, no particular name mentioned in advance, until Judas got the part and his name became proverbial. Before the Judas, there were a lot of people with the same name, but it wasn't proverbial at that time. After his betrayal, his name was proverbial for the person who pulls the rug out from under you, throws you to the wolves, and feeds you to the sharks. How many people name their baby Judas these days?

Akeldema. It means Field of Blood and is associated with Judas Iscariot, the Judas. This links the color of red blood with Judas, who was, undoubtedly, a puppet of Satan.

Two of my Imaginary Friends (something like frenemies), Tough Customer and Tootsie Roll took me for a ride the other day. Tough Customer has a jet black car with an I LOVE SATAN bumper sticker. The front panel of the dashboard is very cool with lots of lights that glow even in the daylight. There is, of course, a connection with the bumper sticker (Prince of Darkness) and Angel of Light.

My old boyfriend Tyrone, also Imaginary, used to like to sing a song that he learned from a record album:

"I don't care if it rains or freezes
Long as I got my plastic Jesus
Sittin' on the dashboard of my car."

I was never really comfortable with that song. While it mentions Jesus, it is obviously riddled with mockery, so there again, you have the opposites ying and yang, mention of holy and unholy.

Though it sounds like a complete digression from the subject of Satan, the dash inside Tough Customer's car looks more like the cockpit of a spaceship, a vintage 1950's Buck Roger's imaginary spaceship, than that of the car I've got, which is nothing to sneeze at. We drove it to look at small household appliances. Tough Customer got a gift card for X-mas. The reference here that will tie this all together will be the popular custom of linking the color red with the Devil.

I fell in love with the best mixer I had ever seen. The floor model was bright red, had an excellent design, with the base being the heaviest part so it wouldn't tip over. This is extremely important to me, because people can be very clumsy.

In illustration: Yesterday, I stepped backwards, almost lost my balance, and in so doing, broke off a shoddily-made plastic appurtenance on the fax machine. I glued it back with Crazy Glue. (It makes you crazy because it takes so long to set up.) I prefer Super Glue. It works faster, and the name at once resonates with the image of mighty super heroes who zoom in to your rescue, some of whom are wearing satiny, bright red tights and cape.

OK, back to real life.

P.S. About the mixer: It looks like it could do about 4-6 dozen batches of muffins at a time. I have yet to test it in the laboratory, but I plan on it.

I am a sometimes student of history and archeology, but an ardent seeker of the odd, the unusual, and the quirky.

I have read quite a bit about the holocaust, although I would not claim to be an authority on it. Still, I wonder if that assault on humanity could be presented in a different light.

I had this thought today. I wondered, would it be possible to write a satire on the holocaust, only making some of the symbolism more extreme to tweak our thinking a little bit? Swift did it. Mel Brooks did it, but could I do it? This is not about "Birds do it. Bees do it."

What if, when the "Gestapo" pounded unexpectedly on the door, the household ran around hiding their Christmas ornaments and cans of Spam, and when everything in the house was turned over by invaders, they found Christmas decorations, gift wrapping, and honey cured hams hidden in the attic rafters, all contraband?

What if the "Resistance" were involved in clandestine Christmas Toys and Gift Basket distribution, scurrying around in the shadows so as not to be apprehended by the Nazis? What if the refugees poured into the train stations and were clutching disheveled suitcases full of tinsel and mistletoe and other seasonal symbols? Hast du gelt? Would become Hast du Christmas?

I would have to answer, "All the money I brought with me is these leaves falling upward from the water."

In Springtime, Hitler would be hit by a putsch of reformists who felt he had been taking the wrong direction in not confiscating all the Danish canned hams in Poland.

Would my satire be any crazier than war?