Party Summary

Preparation
I got up on Friday morning and spent the morning cleaning the floors, brushing the dogs, and doing various cleaning items around the house. I then showered and headed off to pick up the cakes and the salad, which took me about 2 hours including travel time. Of course, traffic was horrible and I made a few wrong turns resulting in me sitting in traffic even longer. I managed to stay calm because getting mad would do me no good ... an improvement upon my natural ball o' stress demeanor. Upon returning home, I took a bit of time out for lunch. I learned the lesson of the importance of eating last time I tried a cooking marathon. I know a good cook samples the food to make sure it tastes OK, but I rarely munch while cooking - it's like the act of cooking makes me less hungry and I rarely eat much after a long cooking session. I think if I worked in a kitchen, I'd be stick thin. Anyway, from 1 to 6:30 I was on my feet prepping and cooking. By the time D got home, I was actually ahead of the game, so much so that I actually got to talk to people and relax and wasn't exhausted. I think printing out the names of the dishes actually helped me beyond being a way to let people know what types of things were in each dish. It was like it worked as a sort of project plan for me not to forget anything.

Food
In terms of cooking, the stew that I made left a bit to be desired. I only had a little of it, but I won't make that again. It wasn't horrible, but certainly nothing to brag about. The bread pudding ratatouille was good and the lasagna was a big hit. I was very pleased with my decision to buy the salad and drop the idea of a second salad. It made things much easier. We had a lot of food left over, including a lot of cake. I ate cake for breakfast. I cannot resist the marionberry poppyseed. I haven't even tried the other two cakes. Why would I when there's my beloved poppyseed?

Dogs
I was quite pleased with Turtle and Eddie. They were a bit annoying sometimes, but for the most part, they were good and did very well with all the little kids at the party. At one point, one of the 2-year-old kids had a cracker or cookie of some sort. Turtle and Eddie thought for sure he wanted to give it to them and kept following him around, but they never took it from him. This made one of our guests who has never petted a dog in her life (gasp!) feel comfortable petting Turtle! I was so pleased when D told me this because when she first arrived, Turtle and Eddie went towards her as they do all people and she very quickly backed into a corner. Anyway, she lived with a dog at one point and never touched it, so this was huge. Eddie has also gotten much better in terms of being OK with lots people and chaos. As I'm sure RG can remember, he used to go hide whenever he was at a gathering with more than 8-10 people, or if the volume of the gathering got too loud. This time, he didn't hide once, nor did I feel at all nervous about him and all the kids. The only thing that made me nervous was his size and the smallness of the kids, but they were all non-fearful kids, so it worked out great.

Clean Up
Usually we clean up right after people leave, but this time we left it for this morning. We still have to wash the dishes, but most of the hard work is done. It's really quite easy to clean up after a party when you have two people focused on it. We had to throw out an obscene amount of food. I hate throwing out food for a few reasons: it's wasteful; any meat thrown away really kills me because an animal had to die; it really bothers me to throw organic, biodegradable things like food into a plastic bag to head to a landfill.

Indoor Compost Bin
Wow! So as I'm typing this, it occurred to me to do Google "compost bin indoors." I've been thinking about why they don't have indoor compost bins and then it occurred to me that they probably exist, but it's just not mainstream yet. I know I could not do an outdoor compost area - I can't even keep up with basic outdoor maintenance - the idea of doing a compost pile is absurd with my level of laziness. However, I found this Indoor Compost Bin. I'm definitely going to do more research on that to see if it's reliable, etc. To me, it would be totally worth the $440 price tag if it meant I could reduce my trash output by half, which is probably the amount of organic waste we throw out. Oh, I'm excited. This may be my birthday gift this year!

Other Tidbits
We are planning to see the new Will Ferrel movie, Stranger Than Fiction, tonight. Tomorrow night we have tickets to see Demetri Martin. Life is good!