Good times

Hey, where'd everybody go?

I miss em, the crazy bastards.

_____________________

The party Saturday was a blast. We had a great time, and I can't say enough to thank everyone for showing up and having a good time with us. It made us very happy to see all of you. Our guests are an extremely generous bunch. We ended this party with possibly more booze than we started with, we've got new tiki accessories and a vintage album by cocktail comedian Woody Woodbury titled "Booze is the Only Answer." Beautiful cheesehead pastry chefs showed up bearing sweets. People brought desserts and more desserts, and more wine. To those of you who couldn't be here, well, hopefully next time?

I think, counting kids and teenagers, there were about 60 or 65 people in and out. We managed to have enough food, enough ice, more than enough beer and sangria (anyone want to stop by for a drink or three?) and everyone seemed to get along fine. It's always fun to introduce people who've never met and then see them talking away later on. We had bakers, writers, cops, artists, entrepreneurs, sign language interpreters, engineers, internet musical geniuses, social workers, unofficial mayors of Chicago, IT professionals, HR marketing professionals, stay home dads, stay home moms, sophisticated European businessmen and mysterious beautiful women who asked not to be identified on this page in order to protect their privacy.

Here's the thing about parties. You do all this work, you get ready, make lists, clean, cook, all that stuff. You set up places to eat and drink, you arrange chairs in a way that you hope will encourage people to socialize. You worry about how you're going to deal with all the garbage when your cans are already half full from housecleaning, and all the food packaging you got rid of. You wonder if anyone will show up, because this might be the time that people realize they're just tired of your bullshit.

Then the party starts, and at some point--Saturday it was about an hour in--the number of guests hits a critical mass and the party starts. And, quickly after that, you lose control and the party becomes almost a living thing on its own. The chairs you set out get moved around, people end up hanging out in places you didn't think they would, your guests start to find their way around your place as they get comfortable and things just seem to run themselves. I love that ride.

So...it turns out that there's always enough food, and if it all gets eaten that just means people liked it. You can always find a good-humored kid who'll take a buck or two to climb into your garbage and recycling cans wearing a pair of your daughter's rain boots and jump up and down, compressing your trash into more manageable piles. When that one defective firework misfires and nearly hits a young girl in the head, setting her hair ablaze, her father doesn't punch you in the face and she actually turns out to have been excited about the whole experience. Lord, I hope so anyway.

See you later, alligators.

Two years of sprawling ramshackle goodness

2 years and 1007 posts ago I started this blog:

I'm finally going to follow my kids' examples and start a blog. What I hope to do is have a place where I can spout off to a potentially large audience (much larger, anyway, than family campouts, holiday meals and parties) and also to connect folks with widely varying interests and backgrounds. We'll see.

I'm still having fun with it. Best of all has been all the cool stuff I found because you stopped by here. Thank you!

And now, to celebrate my second year of blogging, I'm going to continue a tradition that I started on last year's anniversary. I'm going to link to one of the first pictures I posted-- what is now possibly the most popular gut surgery picture on the internet.

See you next year!

Go ahead--you deserve it!

I heard these words, or something like them, several times today. Each time they were spoken by MizBubs, girl dynamo.

Like I said earlier this morning, the past few days have been a blur of yard work and movie rentals. The overall effect, however, was pleasing, not frantic.

MizBubs took me shopping for some new running shoes and a couple of tee shirts. Inspired by a recent post by Justacoolcat we headed to Lurvey's and bought a mock orange shrub to fill an empty spot in the back corner of the yard, and ended up with 3 Spirea shrubs and some water plants as well. Next thing I knew, we were back in the yard digging again.

When we finished I started on dinner. MizBubs decided that we needed a tasty beverage after all our hard work, and the beautiful creation you see above was the result. I asked her what it was, and she called it "A Perfect Day":

Cruzan coconut rum
Mango nectar
Lime Juice

It was perfect.

I got adventurous with a couple of pork tenderloins we had in the fridge, and decided to try a new rub. I must say, it came out wonderfully. The rub had ground coffee, brown sugar, dried chipotle, sage, garlic powder, paprika and salt. It created a damn-near perfect crust on the tenderloins, and I finished it with a sauce I made from chicken stock, chipotle, roasted red peppers and chocolate. It was mighty tasty.

Now it's time to get ready for bed, and the grind of the coming work week.

Celebrating one year of sprawling, ramshackle goodness

One year ago today I posted my very first blog entry. I followed up the next day by posting what has become (judging from my Site Meter) one of the most popular gut pictures on the interwebs.

This time last year I was moping around the house, recovering from an emergency abdominal surgery. My daughters, who were both having fun with xanga and myspace, encouraged me to start a blog. Now, here we are: 598 posts, 1,181 profile views and 10,887 visitors later.

My life is significantly different now than it was then. Most notably, I'm healthy. We're no longer homeschooling our girls, and the pace of our family life has accelerated beyond anything I imagined back then. MizBubs reentered the full-time workforce. I've experienced a shift in how I think about work; I'm now focused on retiring in 3-5 years.

Why did I start this? The short answer is because, as my youngest daughter puts it, I am "blabberous." I'm driven to talk.

I probably could've been a writer, but here's the thing. Rather than organize my thoughts and put them in words, and then put those words on paper, I'd rather have a few drinks and sit around and bullshit with you.

We've been lucky to meet three lovely, really cool people in real life after reading their words on a computer screen: Lulu, Tenacious S and Johnny Yen. One of MizBubs' relatives has recently started blogging, and Splotchy is now one of the first blogs I check every day. I get excited every time I see that somebody in China or Saudi Arabia or France or Malaysia has somehow stumbled onto my blog. I like to think that each post is like a message in a bottle, thrown out into the surf for some stranger to find, maybe years from now.