I fucking love Martha Stewart!!, No shit - I aspire to be like her. Fact is, living well is the best revenge. However, I work in education, so financially, it's a little impossible to live as well as Martha, but I still manage to make do.

Cooking is one of my passions. I come from a long line of notoriously bad cooks. My dad once stuck bologna in the microwave for 6 minutes, then left the remains in the fridge, uncovered, for three weeks. My desire to go to culinary school was actually my way of screaming to be let out of the gastronomical nightmare that was my youth. I didn't make it to culinary school, so instead I spend a fair amount of time at the SOAR recipe archives, which is a great place to go if you're looking for 30 recipes for acorn squash. It searchable by ingredient, culinary style, or recipe name. If you can't find it here, you don't have any business making it. I also dig Food TV. Any network with a show called "Two Fat Ladies" is alright by me.

I've also become quite the wine enthusiast, so much so that I've gotten into home winemaking. We just cracked open my first bottle of homemade peach wine. It's alcoholic enough to run a car on a cold day, and mighty tasty, too. I still love wine made by other people, although I'm hardly a wine snob. I go to tastings to get a buzz, and I'm proud to admit it.

I like to play in the dirt, too. I don't actually garden; that would imply that I maintain the life and health of my plants. I've been told that my garden looks like something from an Anne Rice book - it's all dead, but it never actually goes away. When I make my feable attempts at gardening, I prefer to kill herbs. I do have an appreciation for the gardens of others, especially English gardens.

I have also been known to spend an ungodly amount of time rearranging my furniture, rotating the pictures on my walls, and devising new and interesting rugs to hide the cat puke stains on the carpet. If your like me and spend your life in a rented abode with eggshell white paint, matted carpet, and harvest gold appliances, check out Apartment Life. And while I prefer Southwester Barren desert as my decorating style, I'm strangely drawn to this idea of Martha Stewart Gothic. I'm sure my anti-garden would fit right in. There's also Martha Stuart's [sic] Condom Minimum Living and Decorating, but there are just some things a bastard daughter doesn't want to think about her mother doing.