Tuesday, January 2, 2007

Adventures in Entertaining - continued

Thankfully our planned meal was simple. We were having fried turkey, mashed redskins with smoked gouda and corn. The redskins and corn would be easy but the fried turkey we had never attempted on our own before. First he injected it with a little bit of honey (yum!) and then he injected the turkey with a little bit of Jack Daniels (yummier!) just to give it a little bit more flavor. As he hid out in the garage "watching the bird" I got to entertain our friends who were complaining about various things. They were too hot, too cold, had a fever, whatever. I finally got tired of hearing it so I began ignoring them and pretended to be doing things to get dinner ready.

There were a few people kind enough to offer help and so I put them to work setting up an extra table and more chairs. They also started setting the table for me (hopefully Martha Stewart isn't reading this, boy would she be appalled) and as they were doing this I realized we only had enough place settings for 8 people. So 8 people got regular plates and the least favorite people got paper plates and they were just going to have to deal with it.

We all sat down to dinner at about 8:30 (a good 2 hours after the originally projected dinner time) and the food was fabulous (or so I thought). Everyone seemed to like it but our friend male H complained about our good friend Jack. He exclaimed how he could for sure taste it and that female H (his wife) would have to eat less so she could drive home. He was sure he would be drunk. Thankfully everyone seemed to ignore his comments and between bites murmur "mmm....good" like Homer Simpson.

Everything was quiet and then it happened again. Our tree fell over. It seemed to happen in slow motion. Everyone saw it yet no one could do a thing. The people with their backs to the tree even got to see it thanks to a big mirror in front of them. We all sat there for a second before anyone did anything. Everyone was afraid to talk. Once again there was broken glass, water and ornaments everywhere. We decided we had had enough and that the tree was going to stay there, mess and all. It was to be ignored and not talked about for the rest of the night, which is hard because it is the size of a sequoia now sideways in our living room.

After dinner we decided to play board games. All was uneventful until part way through a game the smoke alarm began screeching. Now we didn't know what was causing it to go off. The power strip and electrical wires that had been smoking earlier had by this time been out for hours. So we began a search to figure out what the cause was. It turned out to be nothing big, simply a candle left burning too long that had been smoking away under the smoke detector. It was quickly extinguished and the board game resumed.

We must have had a rowdy board game going because the husband spilled his beer twice. Female H (who is obsessive compulsive - which always makes for an interesting guest) also spilled her beer. She I guess felt so bad she went to the hallway and cried. Weird I know. I couldn't make this stuff up. All I can say is thank goodness for tan carpet, a dog who likes beer and friends that are not Martha Stewart. The rest of the night went well. No more surprises/things falling. However, the next day was needed to clean up our house yet again. I don't see us entertaining that many people in the near future. Thankfully the New Year's party is at someone else's house.

No comments: