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You can tell we had a good party on Saturday by the fact that my husband and I slept until noon on Sunday.

As predicted, four o’clock turned out to be too early of a start time. I barely had time to make all the food and take a shower before the first guests arrived. My husband was in the shower then.

We ended up having a total of fourteen guests whose arrival times spanned from four o’clock on the dot to about nine o’clock. The last two couples stayed until well after midnight.

I thought the turnout was good, but my husband later fixated on the three or four people who had said they were coming and never showed up. I told him he’s starting to behave like one of his bitter old aunts and he needs to look at the glass as 3/4 full.

As I shopped for party food, it occurred to me that some of my original ideas were a little too girly. Thus, I chose to make Ro-tel/Velveeta dip with tortilla chips, mini smoky links in barbecue sauce, and dill dip for the potato chips. We ended up getting one giant pizza and some cheesy breadsticks. My "healthy" compromise purchase was a veggie tray with ranch dip.

The guests went through it all like a swarm of locusts. We had a little bit of pineapple upside down cake left, but that was about it. Oddly, we had leftover beer, too, but it’s probably because some of the guests brought their own.

During the party, my husband was being cagey about his age because our guitarist is younger than both of us and we’d been carefully neglecting to say how old we are as long as we’ve known him. At some point when I wasn’t around, someone pinned the big 5-0 on my husband in everyone’s earshot, so the cat was out of the bag.

It later transpired that our guitarist hadn’t been entirely upfront about his own age. I distinctly remember him telling us not long ago that he was 35, but on Saturday he fessed up to being 37. So we’re all big ol’ liars.

The party was a good warm-up for our BIG annual party, which we’ll probably have in early June. That’s the one where we invite pretty much everyone we know, so if you live anywhere near me, expect an invitation late next month.

Well, I’m off to take Xena to the vet to be spayed, pick up my tax forms from my accountant, and visit the doctor to see why I still have constant heartburn despite my daily dose of Nexium.

Have a lovely Monday!

My husband’s 50th birthday party starts in about eight hours. So far I have done almost nothing to prepare. I was going to make a list of tasks on a piece of paper, but what kind of blogger does that? No, I must share all of the boring details with the Internets instead!

Here’s what I need to accomplish between now and 4:00 p.m.:

• I am very glad that our cleaning lady came on Tuesday and that we’ve hardly been home since then. Thus, the only cleaning that needs to be done is a quick sweep of the kitchen floor and a wipe of the bathroom counter. It’s also probably time that I loaded and ran the dishwasher.
• My husband has requested a pineapple upside down cake as his birthday cake. He also mentioned rum cake as another favorite, so I thought I’d split the difference and flavor the upside down cake with some pineapple rum. I’ve never actually made a pineapple upside down cake before, but I’m not going to let that stop me.
• I need to get other party food from somewhere: the grocery store, Costco, perhaps the farmer’s market. I’d like to hit the farmer’s market for pico de gallo ingredients, if nothing else. If it weren’t raining and threatening to snow, I’d feel a lot more enthusiastic about the whole thing.
• Then I’ll need to buy some beer. On my list: Boulevard Lunar Ale (I’ve been wanting to try it), Guinness Stout and Newcastle Brown Ale. We already have some Boulevard Wheat and a few Rolling Rocks in the fridge. If someone finds our selection too exotic, he or she is welcome to run down to the liquor store on the corner for watery, mass-produced swill.
• We’ve decided to get two giant pizzas from our favorite pizzeria for the party. The tricky part is knowing when to order and pick them up. Even though the invitations say that the party starts at four, I think most people won’t come until later than that. What would you do?
• My office and the studio are both horribly messy. The studio is my husband’s problem, but I need to do something with my office. I don’t think I have time to clean it up properly, so I’ll probably scoop all the piles of papers into a huge plastic tub, shut the lid and worry about it later. That would sound like a better idea if I didn’t already have another giant plastic tub that I packed with office crap three or four years ago before a party and never bothered to unpack.
• My dressing room/closet room is years overdue for a spring cleaning. I think it’s best if I just shut the door.
• Our band practice room could probably stand to have heavy comforters hung over the windows for soundproofing in case a jam breaks out. Eh, I’ll deal with that if and when it happens (and then only if it looks as though the music will continue past 10 p.m.).
• Once my husband gets up, I’ll make the bed and do what I can to clear off the dresser and bedside tables. The bed is the logical place for people to put their coats, but I don’t want anyone spending too much time eyeing the awful, peeling wallpaper, so I’ll probably just light a couple of candles and keep the lights off.
• The cats will have to move to the basement for the duration of the party. Xena is crazy enough with just two people around. I don’t need her zipping around and biting twenty people, one by one. At some point, I’ll put their food and water and Velcro’s fleece bed downstairs and block the cat door.
• It makes sense to bring up our big plastic utility table and set it up in the living room. Should I cover it with a bedsheet or buy a festive, disposable tablecloth? Decisions, decisions.
• It would be nice to work in a shower, hair fixing and makeup application before our guests arrive. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

That sounds like a lot, but I think it’s fairly manageable. I guess I’ll get dressed, grab a sturdy bag and get started on my shopping. I think this’ll be fun!

Hope your weekend is fun, too.

I’ve been asked to contribute a post to the Lazy Eye Theater John Carpenter Blog-A-Thon, so here goes.

Even though I’d known about this for a couple of weeks, I didn’t had the leisure time to re-watch any of John Carpenter’s movies, so I had to cheat and visit IMDB to get a nice, solid list of the ones I’ve seen. It turns out that I’m more of a Carpenter connoisseur than I thought!

Here are my top-of-mind impressions of the John Carpenter movies in my viewing past:

• Halloween (1978) – Since I was only eleven when this came out and I had very protective parents, it was a while before I caught up with the rest of the world and got the Michael Myers experience firsthand. However, I have since seen the movie a couple of times and feel that it truly deserves its place in horror movie history. It’s suspenseful and creepy and mercifully free of gore.
• Escape from New York (1981) – Love it! Any movie featuring an eye patch-clad character named Snake Plissken is okay by me! Yes, it contains more Ernest Borgnine than any movie needs, but that’s just nitpicking.
• The Thing (1982) – Compared to the 1951 version with its Giant Carrot Monster, this is the scariest movie ever made. It IS really creepy and does a great job playing off the paranoia of the isolated crew who suddenly can’t trust each other. The inside-out dog is something I’ll never be able to un-see.
• Christine (1983) – Not one of Carpenter’s best, but considering that most of Stephen King’s work is practically unfilmable, a valiant effort.
• Starman (1984) – A young Jeff Bridges naked! I have a soft spot for this movie that it may or may not deserve. I think I saw it two or three times when it came out. I just can’t resist science fiction.
• Big Trouble in Little China (1986) – Another classic! A big, colorful, goofy action movie with a ridiculously over-the-top plot and lots of Kurt Russell with bare, muscular arms. What’s not to like?
• Prince of Darkness (1987) – Crazy street person played by Alice Cooper dissolves into a huge mass of cockroaches. Need I say more?
• They Live (1988) – "Rowdy" Roddy Piper modulates the shouting somewhat to play the hero who finds special sunglasses that reveal which of his fellow citizens are evil aliens and which are human. Source of the best cheesy movie line ever (sorry, Bruce Campbell), "I’ve come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum."
• In the Mouth of Madness (1995) – Eh.

I’m thinking a day-long John Carpenter ’80s-fest is in order to wrap up this blog-a-thon. Who’s with me?

I went out into our back yard to hide the eggs about a half hour before my sister and her family arrived. By the time the egg hunt began less than 45 minutes later, some kind of critter had located one of the hard-boiled eggs and chewed through the shell. I tossed that egg into the woods for the animals to finish at their leisure. When I gathered the real eggs from the kids’ baskets and counted them, I was short one more. I hope our local wildlife enjoyed their little snacks.

One thing I didn’t notice in the yard while intent on hiding eggs: a long-dead mammal of some kind – probably a rabbit, heh – strewn across a corner of the yard, most recently, it seemed, by the lawn mower. We kept the children herded away from it. Fortunately I hadn’t been dense enough to put any eggs in that portion of the yard.

I had noticed that there were a bunch of fairly large tree limbs on the ground in the back of the yard. What I hadn’t realized until I stood in the yard and looked closely is that a dead tree had fallen onto our shed. It must have fallen fairly gradually and gently, because the only visible damage to the shed is some smooshed shingles on the back point of the roof. Today I collected tree service recommendations from my co-workers and ServiceMagic, and chose a company to come out, saw up the tree and take it away.

So anyway, the Easter dinner went pretty well. I ended up serving our food
later than I’d meant to because I didn’t take into account how long it
would take for the ham to heat up all the way. That just meant everyone
was extra hungry by the time we ate – except for the kids, who had that
much more time to eat candy.

Incidentally, I got a huge amount of traffic over the weekend to my recipe for dinner rolls. I hope all of you anonymous Internet people enjoyed them. We certainly did!

For dessert we had lemon chiffon pie that
my sister made from our great-grandmother’s recipe. I’ll post that
recipe here sometime soon.

As soon as our guests left, my husband and I immediately took a nap for several hours. Ahhh!

This coming weekend I’m throwing a birthday party for my husband. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it goes as smoothly as last weekend’s entertaining!

My company has started bringing in a yoga instructor twice a week. I missed all the classes last week for various reasons, but caught yesterday’s noon to one o’clock class.

Man, am I out of shape.

This morning, the soreness tells me that my right arm is a lot weaker than my left. That’s not surprising considering that I’m left-handed. I expected more hip and leg ache, but maybe that’ll take longer to set in.

Between the yoga classes and my new jump rope, I hope to shed a good 10-15 pounds of excess winter pudginess as quickly as possible. It would be nice to remain at the jeans size into which I’m currently shoehorning myself.

Another "ow" this week: my husband is the household’s latest victim of debit card number theft. It happened to him in almost exactly the same way that it got me a few weeks ago, despite our separate bank accounts, different last names, etc. We’ve been wracking our brains to figure out how someone got our numbers, and I’m inclined to suspect the data thefts from Marshall’s. We both shop there but not necessarily together, so both our numbers were probably on file.

The final "ow" of the week: tax time. Don’t get me wrong – I’m almost certainly getting a refund. It’s just that I procrastinated gathering up my paperwork until…yesterday. I probably could have gotten everything to my accountant in January, but I didn’t get off my lazy butt to find the charity receipts, etc. until last night. Fortunately, I’d been piling most of the obvious tax forms in a box on my desk as they arrived, but all of the stuff that I received throughout the year was scattered all over the house.

So how’s your week going? Ow or mmmm?

Just in time for April Fool’s Day, we learn that a Derbyshire resident (who wishes to remain anonymous – what are the odds?!) has discovered a mummified fairy. Check out the photos – they’re awesome.

I haven’t enjoyed an elaborate hoax this much since the pickled dragon from Oxfordshire. I’d say this demonstrates that the British are world leaders when it comes to establishing a good prank, especially when you also take into account the Cottingley Fairies.

My favorite gallery of all things hoax-y is the Museum of Hoaxes blog.  Someday I’ll get one of their Save the Jackalope t-shirts.

In my role as an advertising copywriter, I once wrote an outlandish character blog to tie in with a television ad campaign. I did a lot of research and loaded it with the most ridiculous and incongruous details I could think of. Characters from fiction and mythology appeared, as did many tall tale elements from American folklore. My goal was to make sure that nobody could take it seriously.

Of course, there were still a handful of people whose "face value" switch doesn’t operate properly. They left indignant and argumentative comments about how scientifically improbable the stories were. Well, yeah, and did you notice that one of the characters was a Norse god?

That’s why hoaxes will always entertain us. Even though the uber-skeptics like me will immediately clue in, enough people will want to believe to keep a few seeds of doubt planted in the mind of the public until actual evidence surfaces. Then we’ll have to move on to a fun new hoax.

In case you hadn’t noticed, I took most of the week off from posting. For a while it was because I had a miserable headache. After that, it was just too easy to keep cruising on my earlier laziness.

Here are a few things that have gone unblogged of late:

• I found a new vocal instructor. I’d been with my previous one for more than a year and I could tell that I was no longer making progress. In fact, I think I was starting to actually get worse in some respects. I found a new teacher who teaches the Eric Bruner Sing with Power method, which sounded promising. She’s a lot more expensive than the other teacher, but she guarantees results much more quickly and, in fact, promises to quickly put me on a path where I won’t need lessons anymore. My first lesson with her was last Tuesday and I was impressed with her approach. She records every session on CD so you can practice in between lessons and judge your progress. I also found it interesting that she starts by determining a vocalist’s full range and comfortable range, with the goal of increasing the comfortable range to a full three octaves.
• I made a delicious pizza. I always make pizza crust from scratch using the recipe that comes with the Kitchenaid mixer. However, I’ve generally used pizza sauce from a can or jar. Now that I’ve become leery of high fructose corn syrup, I decided to find a recipe to make my own sauce. The first one I tried was called Exquisite Pizza Sauce. It was quite good! I found it a tad too sweet (the next time I’ll cut back on the honey), but otherwise spicy and wonderful.
• I read a whole book in one afternoon. It was The Thirteenth Tale, which I selected for an upcoming book club meeting. I liked it a lot and kicked myself for not figuring out the "twist ending," despite many clues.
• My husband made a startling revelation. He swears he’s never heard of Calvin and Hobbes. How can that be? I even mentioned the "peeing Calvin" stickers on trucks and he looked at me blankly. I followed up with a question about Bloom County and received a similar response. Who’d have thought that our age gap would be revealed not by music, movies or TV, but by comic strips?

Wow, wouldn’t it have been a horrible shame if you’d missed out on all of that vital information forever? </sarcasm>

Have a delightful weekend.