Monday Night Dinner

In which baby showers are had, the cause of the recent bad weather is determined, and the limitations of etch-a-sketch are discovered . . . .

The baby shower was a success.  It wasn’t outside, since while Saturday dawned sunny and beautiful and the temperature rose to the heady heights of the mid-70s, we paid for it on Sunday with endless drizzle and temperatures that were back in the low 60s.  We are all, I’m afraid, paying the price for my vanity.  I was the one that bought the white sundress three weeks ago in the expectation that it might be summer soon and I would be able to wear cute little sundresses to work.  Louisa May Alcott is rolling over in her grave.  Read the rest of this entry ?

Mild panic is my default state for party planning. We’re throwing a baby shower for a friend this weekend and I’ve been planning the menu for the past three weeks. It’s not that it takes three weeks to plan a menu for ten people, but that’s when I sent out the invitations and therefore that’s when I started obsessing about it. On the downside I’ve revised the menu about once a day for the past three weeks. On the upside, I’ve only made one grocery shopping list, and I’ve mostly refrained from writing my ‘To Do’ list for Saturday more than once. In fairness, when I redo my ‘To Do’ lists multiple times at least once is because even I can’t always read my handwriting. This just means I would never be invited to be part of a medieval scriptorium, not that I’m completely OCD. Read the rest of this entry ?

It was my 10 year college Reunion this past weekend. I didn’t end up going for a variety of reasons that aren’t even remotely interesting, but it has made me terribly nostalgic for college. All things considered the food at Bryn Mawr was really pretty good. Oddly enough exactly the same food a mile down the road at Haverford was terrible. This can clearly be attributed to the distressing presence of testosterone on their campus, or possibly it was because they had one dining hall to feed 1200 students and we had three and a half.

The problem is that when you have 1200 women who’ve spent four years being taught to think critically about everything – Foucault, Bede, Virgil, Nietzsche – it starts to spill over into other parts of life. You’ll be innocently watching something on TV – Dawson’s Creek perhaps, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer – and all of a sudden you find yourself tilting your head sideways, narrowing your eyes slightly, and commenting on the post colonialist imagery of Ethan Allen commercials, or the negative gender expectations in Friendly’s ads, and of course the food in the dining halls. Read the rest of this entry ?