First, an apology: right after ranting about all the mistakes I found in my reading, I sent out a barely-literate post yesterday. I tried to do too many tasks at the house and was once again running horribly late, so I finished my blog entry at work (I’m sure that’s much better than doing it at home and coming in later). The problem with that is the Lenovo I got with credit card points for some reason thought it would be a good idea to put the arrow keys where the shift key usually belongs, and I end up typing over what I’ve already written. Did I bother to proofread? No, I did not. In the interest of time, I rushed to post, and you all got to pay the price. Hopefully I have now corrected most of the errors.
Today we are hosting our first official guests in our new house, and I am once again behind the eight ball, which seems to be where I live my life. I know there are correctional therapies for this behavior; perhaps I should be signing up for a semester-long course.
Liz, who used to work at Pat’s while earning her degree in math from Western Not State, is coming all the way from Delaware to visit us, so we thought we’d have one of our corporate lunches (it’s our best feature at Pat’s). Since the last time anyone from the shop saw the house, I’m not sure walls were even painted, it seemed like we ought to host here instead of going to a restaurant.
At the very least, I owe this to my co-workers, who have been extremely tolerant of my continued absences, not just for the last couple of weeks, but pretty much the entirety of the last year. Since they’ve had to put up with it the most, they deserve the honor (if that’s what it is, to be a guinea pig) of becoming our first official guests.
This morning, as I can’t even find cat food, I’m not sure how good a plan this is, but human food is taken care of, and as long as we have enough propane in our grill, that end should be fine. I suppose we do always have a stove in case of emergency, but I’m not sure Lynn is ready yet to christen her kitchen with hamburger and brat grease.
So far it feels like were making far more messes than usual, but I’m wondering if it’s because we’re stressing over the defilement of new surfaces. The cats, who between them have thrown up each of the last three days, don’t seem nearly as concerned about this, but I made a huge mess in the refrigerator this morning with raspberries and was not happy about it.
And Lynn is warming up (har) to her new oven. New neighbor Tracy Leonard knocked on our door last night to warn us of the mosquito spraying he was having done and said (after he welcomed us to the neighborhood), “And you’re already baking cookies!”
Lynn felt her chocolate chip cookies looked “anemic,” but I can personally attest that the peanut butter cookies looked and tasted the same as always, which is to say, delicious. I believe our lunch guests will get to test this out for themselves.
So company is coming for lunch, and if this goes all right, we may try hosting our breakfast peeps on Sunday. If it goes badly, we’ll just fill all our table space with clutter (we have a storage shed filled with furniture) and tell people we don’t have room to host.
In the meantime, I have located the Big Box o’ Party Fun, but not inventoried its contents, and there are tomatoes to slice and onions to dice . . . so I’ll cut this short to get moving in somewhat expedient fashion (ha!). You’ll know how hosting went based on the number of party invitations extended from here on out.
(And yes, we’re well aware of our open house obligations. I promised that to Mr. Leonard just this morning. But we would like to get a little more unpacked and a tad more constructed — don’t forget Shelf-a-Palooza — first.)
Lynn found her own Big Box o’ Party Fun at work this morning. Solo: the company that knows how to party.
Garbanzo Beans for Breakfast 