December 12, 2004

The Day After

Last night was our housewarming party -- looking back on things from the somber light of the next day, I'm pleased to say that it was pretty much a complete success!

We had a bit of a rough beginning: we spent too much time prepping the house (that is, shoving miscellaneous not-yet-unpacked boxes into closets) and not quite enough time prepping the food before our guests started showing up. But our partygoers were tolerant and helpful, setting out plates and napkins and pouring mixed nuts and M&Ms into various bowls as I continued to work in the kitchen. A short while after that, things started picking up, and as the evening took its course, all of my essential criteria for success were met:

  • Lots of people came! Counting on our fingers this afternoon, we must've had 35 or so guests, all told.
  • Everybody had someone to talk to -- nobody was sitting in a corner looking brooding or lonely (or, at least, they were doing a great job of hiding it).
  • The weather was great -- after a week of rain, it's started to feel like Sunny California again, so we were able to open the patio doors and put some chairs outside.
  • We didn't run out of food! I'm not sure how that happened, as nobody seemed shy about eating and we still ended up with plenty of leftovers; it must've been something along the lines of Jesus' miracle with the loaves and the fishes.
  • People liked our house, and were full of praise for everything from our bedroom furniture to our living room light fixtures.
  • People liked our food:
    • The professional winos -- the guests that we know from Shelby's parents' wine group -- seemed suitably impressed by our initial wine selection, so I must be climbing the ranks into connoisseurship.
    • Like at our San Jose farewell party, everybody was fascinated by our raclette set, eagerly seizing the opportunity to custom-melt their own meat/cheese/vegetable dishes. (What's raclette? Here's a page with some background.)
    • As usual, people were impressed by my pies -- one apple, one lemon meringue -- they're easy to make, and I just take the recipes straight out of the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, but nobody ever seems to believe that.
After having such a good evening, we're already fishing around for an excuse to throw our next party.

One thing that we completely forgot to do was to take pictures! The best we can leave you with is a view of some of our day-after wreckage.


Posted by Kevin at December 12, 2004 06:03 PM
Comments

Also: we had been feeling very guilty for inviting the neighbors on one side of our house, and not the neighbors on the other side -- we didn't do it because we hate them, or we're already in a neighbor-vs-neighbor feud, or something like that -- it's just that the mystery neighbors have never been home to hand an invitation to, and haven't shown themselves to say word one to us since the day we moved in.

Well, the other neighbors (who were perfectly likeable folks, and had no problem at all mingling in with our party crowd) didn't know the mystery neighbors at all, either -- the woman of the couple had been living in her house for eight years, and she couldn't tell me the owners' names, or even hazard a guess at how many people might be living in the house.

So now I don't feel so bad.

(There is occasionally a light on in the mystery neighbors' house, but it's usually a dim light in a single room, behind a windowshade that's pulled all of the way down. I hope that this isn't one of those things where the occupant died a year ago and the gardener and the utilities are still being automatically paid out of the deceased's bank account -- or a situation where someone's bought an empty house, put blackout paper over all of the windows, and gutted the innards to turn the house into a stealth marijuana greenhouse ...)

Posted by: Kevin at December 12, 2004 07:55 PM
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