Friends, Family, and Me Sweating Most of the Morning

The baby shower was Saturday, and a fun time was had by all (most?).

The morning was filled with me bringing chairs out to the back patio from our basement storage, running to two different grocery stores to find properly ripe avocados, and cleaning dog feces off of the side of our building.

Bringing up the chairs wasn't that much of a hassle (Kristen's brother Jay helped, and he was also kind enough to clean them off). But, as many of you know, physical activity on my part, especially when in the spring or summer, leads to perspiration, usually about a bucketful for each degree above 78 degrees. As it was 82, it did not look good.

When I do physical things and sweat, I also tend to overheat, which also causes me to get extremely testy and crabby. It is why I'm meant to live in Alaska (like the kid from Into the Wild, but without the starvation part, of course), but I digress...

After the chairs, I walked to the front of our building and noticed a pungent smell accompanied by a swarm of flies. Flies and a smell. Not a good thing.

I love dogs. Love them. I can't wait to get a dog (I want a Bernese Mountain Dog, whereas Kristen wants a Bulldog; I'm winning this arguement, I'll tell you what). But while dogs are fabulous, their owners really aren't. So a dog made a horrible mess not two feet away from our building's side entrance (said entrance where people would be going to get to the shindig), and that meant I had to clean dog diarrhea off of brick.

It sounds a lot more fun than it really was, I'll tell you what.

So then, after scrubbing a wall for 15 minutes, I washed my hands and arms with scalding water and ran out first to the grocery down the street looking for guacamole ingredients. They had everything except for avocados. Well, they had them, but they were about 5 days from being ripe. (I tested this out by throwing one at another customer's head. He dropped like a sack of dirt. If he had said "ouch", they would've been 2 days from ripeness; if he had shrugged it off, it was ready to go.)

So I dropped off the other ingredients at home and drove off to Dominick's, where I threw some avocados at a shopper (I got a cross between the "ouch" and the shrug -- something like a "guh", so I figured I was close enough), and came home. (I won't even mention that I forgot a lemon and to run out again to the local shop.)

So, during this time of my running about, Kristen was boiling eggs, so when I returned, I deviled them up, and then started in on the guacamole (which Kristen finished so I could take a shower; did I mention that I was sweaty?). About this time, our friend Katia, who was so kind to help us host the event (she sent out really great e-invitations and brought over fruit and snacks, more of which I'll talk about later) arrived, allowing me to jump in the shower.

During my craziness, Kristen was cleaning up the place, just in case we were rained out and had to bring the party in from the back patio, and her brother ran out to get us lunch (yummmm... chicken with green mole).

And just like that, everything was done. The guacamole. The deviled eggs. The hot hors d'oeuvres. The soda chilled. The plates and plastic utensils and cups all out. I stopped sweating.

And right on the dot at 1:30, people arrived. Nearly everyone that said they were coming actually made it (although illness and a broken-down car kept some away). Barnabas got plenty of wonderful loot, and, thankfully, the rain never came.

And the cake was the topper. See, as most of you know, Kristen and I both grew up on the East Coast, she in New Jersey and me in Pennsylvania. There we were treated with Carvel ice cream stores, which would produce the most wonderful and fake tasting cakes, often times formed into the shape of an alien or a whale. (You had to be there, I guess.) Well, Carvel is slowly expanding, so a shop opened up in the northern suburbs. Our friend Barb was kind enough (on direction from Katia) to go out and get us a huge Carvel cake.

Good, good times.

Kristen will post some pictures of the party soon, and if she doesn't, be sure to bug her about it.

Again, thanks for everyone who came, and to those who couldn't make it, you missed some good eggs.