It's been a long week

Busy, mostly in a good way, but busy. The Cliff's Notes version:

Friday, 12/31: Happy Birthday, Big Girl! For the record, it's not her finest picture ever. And she was standing in the nose section of what I seem to remember as a DC-3. So you can imagine she might have been too busy to pose like a supermodel. I'm off work, Mrs. sends me & youngest off to local children's museum so Mrs. can surprise us with homemade chocolate/mint fudge. WOW. And delicious. (museum was fun - membership means we can go anytime for 45 mins & not feel like we wasted money.)

Saturday: Big girl has a lunch invitation that lasts till Shabbos is over. Mommy gets a nap, Daddy gets to read uninterrupted for three hours. Evening actually has me & Mrs. Skinny take a night out. Local performance by an improv troupe, arranged by the Sisterhood at one of our Synagogues. Accompanied by a kosher attempt at barbecue, which was edible. The show was lots of fun.

Sunday: Lord help us. Birthday party day. 30 children 5 & under in our house. My one key line to Mrs. after was "I told you so." She agreed we didn't need to invite so many kids. Lots of help from my parents (dad brought his keyboard, and entertained musically while the paid entertainment was doing her best to keep kids in line for face painting) and other parents who stayed with their kids & served pizza, juice & cake. It was pretty rough, I must say. They get a smaller party next year. My folks stuck around & we headed off (along with two nieces) to the local chinese place for their buffet, which is better tasting & a better deal than ordering direct.

Monday: Launch date. The catalogs I have been building for 4 years, and the software installation that took so long to realize finally went live. It went smoothly, and pretty quietly for all the agita that went into getting it done. Somewhat anticlimactic, in fact. Probably just as well. It hasn't led to a deluge of reference requests, but it did bring some nice notes from colleagues around the organization.

Tuesday: Hmmm. I'm not sure anything happened. We made more fudge, which was not as successful as the mint. Milk chocolate/butterscotch, white chocolate/butterscotch. The latter tasted good, but didn't set properly. Mistakes happen.

Wednesday: All day fixing up my own web stuff. But at night. Oh man. We got invited a week ago to a 40th birthday party for a friend. Like the together people we are, we never called the inviter back until the night before. We figured "no big deal, we can show up, have cake & chips" Mrs. was dressed pretty casually, but I guessed it wouldn't matter.

Oh boy.

We show up at the house back in our old stomping grounds in the Bronx, and there's valet parking. At a house. Uh-oh, says Mrs. We go inside (we're early), and there's servers carrying trays. There's a bar. I am in BIG trouble for telling Mrs. not to change. Plus we figured it was low-key, so we had eaten dinner. Well, I was forgiven for the faux pas (that's "goof" in Frenchytalk) when we tasted the meat on a stick being passed around. Oh, it was fabulous. And then the little franks in blankets. And the... and the...

Well, we had two dinners last night. Between the actual dinner served later, and the food passers, I ate like a pig. Believe it or not, I've never had lamb chops before. I was a picky eater as a kid (hence my svelte frame) , and I've never wanted to risk buying it in case I hated it. Well, they had 'em last night, and they were fabulous. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.

They topped everything off with the most amazing bit of food related gadgetry I've ever seen. The tower o chocolate. It was one of these deals. I'd never seen one, and it's really cool. The chocolate runs down in a waterfall, and you take your strawberry/marshmallow/slab of beef and stick it under the chocolate, and whammo! You got a chocolate covered prime rib.

Anyway, it was a lovely party, and the birthday girl and her husband are among the nicest people we've ever met, and we had a great time.

Today: busy working on somebody else's website. They seem ready to get things in gear, so I've been webbing away (spiderman, spiderman).

So that's my life for the last week. Any questions?