Graduation - and the party - went off without a hitch, from where I sat. My daughter, whose digestive system has been one of our main areas of interest over the past year and a half, woke up with butterflies and apparently spent some of the pre-graduation moments throwing up from nerves, so I guess she'd call that a hitch. But if she hadn't told us, we wouldn't have known.
Too much food at the party, though. I need to go to Caterer's school or something, because 18 pounds of meat was just way too much for 50 people, apparently. My mom thinks we had 80 over the course of the party - I'm not so sure about that. People seemed to have a good time, and didn't seem to mind or notice that I mostly stayed in the background making sure we didn't run out of meat in the dining room.
For what it's worth, packages of barbecue pork and turkey contain an awful lot of liquid, and when it leaks all over the bottom of the oven without anyone noticing, you get a lot of smoke two days later when you preheat it to cook something. We found that out last night, so I thought I'd share.
And the family is all scattered back to their homes or vacation destinations and out of our hair, thank goodness. Poor things, though - we didn't plan for altitude sickness when we scheduled things to do with all of them, and making them climb up to the top seats in the baseball field, or drive to the top of a mountain pass for breakfast, maybe wasn't such a good idea.
Our last family event was on Memorial day itself - dinner with the sister-in-law-from-hell, her husband and son. It was all about them. The son (age 5, and basically undisciplined) wanted a cinnamon roll for dinner - at a Mexican restaurant. When told they didn't have cinnamon rolls, he announced that he would have chips. So when the chips (complimentary appetizers - standard Mexican restaurant practice) arrived, he grabbed them, because obviously, they were "his". His parents then ordered him a child's burrito for dinner. And when it arrived, he declared indignantly to the waitress, "That's NOT what I ordered!".
Who taught him that one? Creepy little twerp. We had to keep the training collar on Anneke all night, to keep her out of his reach, because he had been observed earlier in the weekend smacking her in the face. She was good; she didn't bite him. And if I'd seen him at it, I'd have done it for her.
But they're all gone now, and our planning is now focused on getting on the ship for the cruise.
That, and finishing up (over the past 2 days), my slightly oversized Indy 500 project. Yikes - when I decided to tape-and-mud the new wall separating our bedroom from the closet we had built last fall, I think I must have blotted out the memory of how much pain it produces. And how bloody hard it is to do a good job at it. The corner finishing tool kept digging trenches in the mud laid down where we'd had to patch the wallboard after removing the old wall (it moved back about a foot). All of it overhead, all of it (for neatness sake) with my right arm. It still moves, but movement is now accompanied by sound effects (groans, mostly). Last night was sanding and painting night. And I'm getting pretty good at flat surfaces - after painting, there's only a slight clue that anything happened. But the trenches were awful - I resorted to using a sponge to soften their edges, but was unable to eradicate them.
Who looks at ceilings anyway? Not me.
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