In addition to avoiding diabetes and moisturizing more, entertaining is one of the things that has been occupying my time while waiting for my new job to start. Now that I have left NYC and live in an apartment that can fit more than three people at a time, plans for dinner parties, Oscar parties, and a return of the much loved Small Party (Le Petit Soiree) have been bouncing through my head for months.
So, I've been meaning for a while to write a post about hosting dinner parties, and in fact made a half-hearted effort last month in my entry about the pressure to be a crack pastry chef. The folks over at StuffWhitePeopleLike have saved me the effort, and summed up perfectly the thirtysomething's formula of hosting a dinner party and the anxieties that accompany it.
Thus, you are saved from my own personal diatribes about hosting dinner parties -- and one very gross story about how I fell victim to the bubonic stomach flu right smack in the middle of the dinner party I hosted last month. Not pretty.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Monday, March 17, 2008
I Don't Want to Wait, For Our Lives to be Over...
I'm back from North Cack-a-lack-ee, and it was fantastic. We traveled to Bald Head Island, right near the NC-SC border, and just south of Wilmington, NC, the locale where the beloved teen-opic Dawson's Creek was filmed. True to the idyllic waterside (nee Capeside) scenery of The Creek, it was a fantastic trip.
Eleven of us converged upon a large beach house on Bald Head to celebrate my friend Kate's birthday. (Bald Head is fun to say, no; although not nearly as fun as Gay Head, on Martha's Vineyard.) It was like a grown-up version of spring break, or a slightly more juvenile version of The Big Chill. We drank wine, played games, ate delicious seafood and corn on the cob, and chased each other through the house with water guns. I lost countless games of cards, and read a book in a rocking chair perched just above the dunes, alongside the ocean. Dreamy.
On the downside, I have a dreadful stripe of sunburn on my lower back from laying on a bench reading a book. No, it wasn't warm enough to wear a bathing suit. I was just a fool in low-rider jeans with an inadvertent couple of inches of skin showing between my jeans and my slightly shifted t-shirt. It never fails -- take me near a beach and I'll manage not only to get a sunburn, but a striped sunburn clearly illustrating the 2-inch by 8-inch patch where I forget to apply sun block. (Usually it's a stripe on my armpits or near the edge of my bathing suit.)
One of the most fun parts about Bald Head is that cars aren't allowed. So everyone putt putts around in little golf carts. I was content to let everyone else chauffeur me around until Saturday night, when we were returning from dinner at the Raw Bar on the island. We went to the ferry to pick up a friend, and headed back to the house. But, while we had been gone at dinner, a huge storm passed, and there were fallen branches, frogs, puddles, etc. making the roads nearly impassible for regular cars, let alone the little golf cart I was driving. PLUS, it was pitch black. There aren't any street lamps on the roads, and the headlights on the cart were weak. We would have been better off with two little pen lights taped to the front of the cart. PLUS, some of the people in the cart -- not me, the driver -- were stinking drunk and noisy, and I don't know how to park when it's noisy, let alone drive.
We made it back, though. While I may be a sucky card player, I'm an awesome navigator and driver, with a sense of adventure and direction that needs neither map nor clear road. (Okay, my friend Debbi, even when drunk, is an awesome navigator and numerous times kept me from my going in the wrong direction, even though I was absolutely positive that I was right and she was wrong.) But the important thing is, we made it back.
Eleven of us converged upon a large beach house on Bald Head to celebrate my friend Kate's birthday. (Bald Head is fun to say, no; although not nearly as fun as Gay Head, on Martha's Vineyard.) It was like a grown-up version of spring break, or a slightly more juvenile version of The Big Chill. We drank wine, played games, ate delicious seafood and corn on the cob, and chased each other through the house with water guns. I lost countless games of cards, and read a book in a rocking chair perched just above the dunes, alongside the ocean. Dreamy.
On the downside, I have a dreadful stripe of sunburn on my lower back from laying on a bench reading a book. No, it wasn't warm enough to wear a bathing suit. I was just a fool in low-rider jeans with an inadvertent couple of inches of skin showing between my jeans and my slightly shifted t-shirt. It never fails -- take me near a beach and I'll manage not only to get a sunburn, but a striped sunburn clearly illustrating the 2-inch by 8-inch patch where I forget to apply sun block. (Usually it's a stripe on my armpits or near the edge of my bathing suit.)
One of the most fun parts about Bald Head is that cars aren't allowed. So everyone putt putts around in little golf carts. I was content to let everyone else chauffeur me around until Saturday night, when we were returning from dinner at the Raw Bar on the island. We went to the ferry to pick up a friend, and headed back to the house. But, while we had been gone at dinner, a huge storm passed, and there were fallen branches, frogs, puddles, etc. making the roads nearly impassible for regular cars, let alone the little golf cart I was driving. PLUS, it was pitch black. There aren't any street lamps on the roads, and the headlights on the cart were weak. We would have been better off with two little pen lights taped to the front of the cart. PLUS, some of the people in the cart -- not me, the driver -- were stinking drunk and noisy, and I don't know how to park when it's noisy, let alone drive.
We made it back, though. While I may be a sucky card player, I'm an awesome navigator and driver, with a sense of adventure and direction that needs neither map nor clear road. (Okay, my friend Debbi, even when drunk, is an awesome navigator and numerous times kept me from my going in the wrong direction, even though I was absolutely positive that I was right and she was wrong.) But the important thing is, we made it back.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
On the Road Again
In a few hours, I'm heading on the road again for mini-break down South. My friend Kate has invited a group of people to spend a few days hanging out in her boyfriend's family house on an island off the coast of North Carolina. I have absolutely no idea what the island is called, just that cars aren't allowed on the island. It should be dandy -- I'm looking forward to a few days filled with sweet tea and sunshine.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Nerves and Stomach Pains
So if last week I was worried about making delicious chocolate mousse pies, that's the furthest thing from my mind this week. It could be that the pie actually turned out tasty. Or, it could be that I made an awesome dinner on Saturday for some friends, thus proving I am an awesome cook. But probably it's because I was sick with the stomach flu for two days, and when I think about food even now, I still want to vomit. Blecch.
Apart from an aversion to eating again and some lingering dehydration, I'm pretty much fully recovered. Which is good, because tonight's my first night on-call for the volunteer program I previously mentioned. I got my pager and staff phone out this morning and was fiddling a little bit. Shortly, I'm going to grab my training materials and go through what I need to do tonight.
Suffice it to say, I'm a little nervous. I'm not entirely sure why I'm so nervous, since I have worked with DV clients before, and even represented them in court. In theory, you would think that is more nervewracking. But, it seems different. When I've volunteered before, I've helped with mainly the legal system, which I know fairly well. Also, by the time you met someone as a legal advocate, the urgency of the situation has tapered off somewhat , and my role at least seemed a little more one-dimensional and detached. With the new on-call program, though, I feel much more aware of the immediacy of what's going on, and much more responsible for being a more comprehensive advocate and empathetic listener (or is it sympathetic listener?). So, I'm nervous.
In any case, my first shift starts this evening. We'll see how it goes.
Apart from an aversion to eating again and some lingering dehydration, I'm pretty much fully recovered. Which is good, because tonight's my first night on-call for the volunteer program I previously mentioned. I got my pager and staff phone out this morning and was fiddling a little bit. Shortly, I'm going to grab my training materials and go through what I need to do tonight.
Suffice it to say, I'm a little nervous. I'm not entirely sure why I'm so nervous, since I have worked with DV clients before, and even represented them in court. In theory, you would think that is more nervewracking. But, it seems different. When I've volunteered before, I've helped with mainly the legal system, which I know fairly well. Also, by the time you met someone as a legal advocate, the urgency of the situation has tapered off somewhat , and my role at least seemed a little more one-dimensional and detached. With the new on-call program, though, I feel much more aware of the immediacy of what's going on, and much more responsible for being a more comprehensive advocate and empathetic listener (or is it sympathetic listener?). So, I'm nervous.
In any case, my first shift starts this evening. We'll see how it goes.
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