A Little Entertaining

A very long weekend. I love it. It was another hellish week at Burpie Cow Wow. I'm actually quite inured to it all which I think is good. My mate is in worse shape than I. He even made an appointment last week with a hypnotherapist. He missed the appointment which is par for his recent out-of-control course. We met a friend for a quiet Friday night dinner at one of our favorite 5th Avenue restaurants and avoided all talk of the real world.
Saturday AM I was up early to make my shopping lists. My cousin and his new wife and his two grown children were coming to dinner Sunday night. The cousin is in from the west coast. His kids live here in Brooklyn. I haven't seen either in at least 20 years.
My cousin now works for Apple at their headquarters in Cupertino. He lives in that unreal area of the coast just north of Carmel.
I would throw an official dinner party. I invited a few more New York relatives to round out the group to an even ten.
I did a quick clean up of the house. That consists of throwing all the crap that piles up on horizontal surfaces into shopping bags and stuffing them in closets.
Mac-husband and I both made several trips to various food purveyors across the neighborhood on the coldest day of the winter thus far but the sun was warm and the prospect of using the fireplace was enticing.

The menu:
plenty of wine, of course
Cheeses and olives and vegetables with dip
Green salad with pear and grilled tuna
Fillet of beef with scalloped potatoes and roast asparagus
Tarte Tatin with vanilla ice cream

All went well. I especially enjoyed my cousin's children.
His daughter is a physics teacher at a prestigious New York City independent school "...after college I just hung out in St. Luis Obispo working in a coffee shop and smoking a lot of pot."
His son is a drop-out from an English Lit PhD program at Columbia who now works for a hedge fund. "...I really hate it and all the people I work with. I'm not going to blow up the building or anything though."
My younger brother also came out from Manhattan. He's always funny and edgy.

We sent the guests home at a reasonable hour neither too early nor too late – Legends car service ( better cars and distinctly middle-eastern with American flags stuck in their rear-view mirrors to throw you off any terrorist inklings) for the cousin and wife who were headed to a Manhattan hotel, Arecibo car service for the kids who would be perfectly comfortable heading back to Williamsburg in those jalopy cars, with the cardboard air fresherners and salsa background music, my brother by subway as he eschews cabs of any kind.

Monday I was up early to do the clean up which I actually enjoy. I worked for half a day as I had network consultants going over our servers at school. My colleague who is the official "Network Manager" had his nose out of joint about that so I had to spin it a bit to get him to swallow this (to him) intrusive pill. He doesn't realize yet that it will be a lot worse before it gets better. Oh, don't get me started down that road.

Tuesday I'm up and off to the dentist to repair some broken teeth. He'll tell me for the fourteenth time, "I think you grind your teeth at night." I probably should just get all my teeth sheathed in steel like Jaws, that villian in The Spy Who Loved Me.