Believe it not, folks, we’ve actually got ALL of the food prep done for our White Elephant party tonight. That’s a feat in itself because in all the years past we have been panicking in the kitchen about five minutes before the ascribed “start of the party” time. But it’s 12:16 p.m. and Denis and I can now leisurely get the house cleaned and furniture ready for our guests. It’s fantastic and wonderful to know I can actually sit and relax when the first handful of guests arrive before having to rush and start heating up the hors d’oeurves.
In other news, Denis and I are both in pain from our labors. Yesterday Denis shoveled snow for a good portion of the morning and used muscles he hadn’t ever been aware of before. And for some reason I ended up with sore feet and an aching back last night – I don’t know if it’s from our hard work yesterday or the pregnancy. Either way, we looked like to old-timers shuffling around our house last night at bedtime.
So far only two people who had originally said they were coming to the party have backed out. My friend Ste has a paper due on Monday and figured he’d better start working on it this weekend. So he and his boyfriend will be staying in Central NJ this weekend. So we’ll end up with a round number of 30 people at the party – not bad!
I’m now printing out the signs to put in our bathroom. Last year a few people flushes the party napkins down the toilet and by the end of the night our basement had flooded (we have an unusable half bath in the basement where all the water from the house goes before leaving the house). So this year I am putting up signs stressing that the toilet is meant for toilet paper only. I wrote up a nice little poem so that people don’t feel as though I’m saying “don’t be an idiot – paper towels don’t flush”. It was so nasty last year to go into the basement and see that gross water halfway across the basement. It was at that moment that I decided that we would NEVER finish off the basement – I’d hate to turn it into a TV room with nice carpeting that gets destroyed because someone’s tampon got stuck in the pipes. Gross, I know, but true.