My Commonplace Book

The Seder last night went very well, although it was very sparsely attended. In the past couple of years the prime mover of the event has managed to increase the turnout to over 40 people, largely by making lots and lots of phone calls in addition to the standard listings in the various announcement venues of the congregation (newsletter, Sunday bulletin, weekly email blast). This year we only had 21 people, which was very disappointing.

But those who did come greatly enjoyed it. We had lots of compliments, as always, and a lot of people pitched in at the end to help clean up the room, though the kitchen chores were done by the three dedicated people who have done cleanup for several years in the past. Rather than use disposables, the congregation uses regular dishes, glasses and silverware for potlucks, so there's a lot of washing to do at the end of an event. We do have an industrial dishwasher that does an entire cycle in 2 minutes (without drying, though, which has to be done by hand if you want to do sequential loads immediately). But everything still has to be  thoroughly rinsed, loaded, unloaded, and dried, over and over, so there's lots of work to do.

The other committee person and I worked on the room cleanup. I started attending to the distribution of leftovers years ago, because I was the one who thought to do it while there were still people around to take them because I hate to see perfectly good food thrown out, so that's become my job. There's always plenty of wine, grape juice and matzo (since they have to be spread out among the tables, all the bottles and boxes end up open and then only partially used), plus a variety of potluck dishes in disposable containers that people leave there, usually because they don't want to take fattening food home with them and they figure someone else will take it!

But you'd be surprised at how hard it is to give the leftovers away! I want the people who pitch in until the place is cleaned up to get them, but they don't necessarily want anything I have to give away. (Matzo is the hardest, but I did manage to find a home for most of it this year.) The one bottle of grape juice that I couldn't get anyone to take I labeled for the staff and put in the refrigerator -- hopefully they'll find it and drink it!

After finishing leftovers detail I did some running back and forth bringing things from the room into the kitchen (we were in the smaller room, which also happens to be farther from the kitchen, so it's a long traipse), but I don't mind the walking nearly as much as I do standing in one place. Eventually I ended up in the kitchen drying dishes, but at least I could do that sitting down.

I was exhausted by the time I left, but it was worth it!

Although technically Passover hasn't started yet (it begins this year at sundown on April 19), my UU congregation's Seder is today. (We've found over many years of trial and error that Sunday late afternoon is the best time for an event, and that it's unwise to compete with the real Jewish Seders because our mixed couples go to their families' Seders on the first and second night.)

I'm one of the main people involved with the Seder, so I have a bunch of stuff to do. In the past several years I've led the Seder, but I told the other member of the committee (yeah, there are only two of us) that I thought it would be better to have different people do it. (A traditional Seder is led by the head of the family, and in the past the minister has always done it, since they are the "head" of the church "family". But when I approached our current minister in her first year about starting to plan the Seder, she said she is "not interested." In fact, she has only bothered to even attend one Seder in the four years she's been our minister.

But my other committee member found someone else to do it this year, and I met with him yesterday to go over the Haggadah we use. He grew up in a Jewish family, but I was surprised to find that he remembers even less about his childhood Seders than I do. (He remembers that they had some, but nothing about them.)

At any rate, I'm delighted that I don't have to do it this year. But I do have to go shopping for the items for the Seder plate, and be there by 4:00 to help set up, so I'm off to the supermarket. (I already have my contribution to the potluck Seder meal.) Unfortunately my new med doesn't seem to be working as well as it had been, or maybe the higher dose is just causing more dopeyness. But it's not any worse than I've been, so I'll do okay, especially since I only have a small part (the "mother" who lights the candles) and can then relax and just enjoy the Seder like anyone else.

I had a great time at my 60th birthday bash last Sunday!

I had about 50 guests, including woofiegrrl, vdentata, eudyptes, goingdriftless, momomom, phoenix_glow, and tleeves, who I got to meet in person for the first time!

I was delighted to have friends there from many aspects of my life -- family, friends from church, from my bird club, from LJ, miscellaneous friends, and I know I'm forgetting at least one other category my co-mod from freecycle. It felt really good to pull all the parts of my life together that way. And everyone was very friendly -- even the people who didn't know anyone else were absorbed in conversations every time I looked around. No one was sitting alone.

The weather was blissful. If I could have ordered weather for an outdoor party, I would have ordered exactly what I got: bright sun, temperature in the upper 70's, and a very slight warm breeze out of the south. It was a perfect day to be in the park!

I had asked Meredith and A to bring the cake. Specifically, I had told them, "Actually what I would love is if you would get a birthday cake! Just a regular sheet cake from Giant or Costco or wherever is fine." But instead they brought two cakes -- an enormous chocolate one with chocolate icing (at least two feet long), and a slightly smaller vanilla one with white icing.



And they were definitely not "regular sheet cakes"! A wouldn't say where she got these cakes, but they were obviously from an excellent bakery. The cake was delicious, with a filling of fresh strawberries, and yummy buttercream icing. Usually people just take a small square to celebrate, since ordinary sheet cakes don't taste like much. But these were so good that everyone kept coming back for more! Nearly the entire huge chocolate cake was gone, and most of the vanilla one.

What made the party especially wonderful for me was the help of four special people: My daughters, Meredith and A, and two friends, Ann and Wendy. They did all the work so that I could enjoy my own party -- from posting balloons at critical turns and setting up the pavilion to cleaning up at the end, as well as everything that had to be done during the party.  I saw A go back and forth several times carrying out filled trash bags and replacing them with new ones, and Meredith got the cake ready for me.



A few of the guests who were still there at the end also pitched in with cleanup, which was really nice. It's a trash-free park, and several people grabbed bags of trash or recyclables to take home, and Ann took whatever was left. My car was full of coolers and leftovers -- mainly drinks and paper goods, which I had drastically overestimated! I have to make a run to Costco and return what wasn't opened, but I have a lot of Pepsi, iced tea, lemonade, napkins, and whatever else was opened. In hindsight I should have just bought the drinks and paper goods at the supermarket -- that way the opened packages would have been smaller and I could have returned more of it. Oh well ... I'll certainly have enough beverages to offer anyone who comes over for the next couple of years!

Although I had made it clear on the invitation that I didn't want gifts, a few people brought them anyway, and I got quite a few cards. Unfortunately the cleanup crew helpfully took all the cards and put them in one of the gift bags, so now I'm not sure who to thank for that present! One of the cards was separate from the others, so I'm hoping that was the one that was originally in the bag. :-)

I had another gift, too -- something non-tangible. goingdriftless brought her guitar and sang a few of her songs for me! Unfortunately most of the guests had left by then, but some of the ones who were left came over to listen. Frankly I didn't care whether anyone else listened or not -- I loved it!

My actual birthday was two days later, October 23. A couple who had originally said they could come to the party called me on Friday to say something had come up, and asked if they could take me to lunch on my birthday instead, which I gratefully accepted. So on Tuesday the three of us went out for Chinese food. The party was the celebration for my birthday, but it was really nice to be able to celebrate on my birthday instead of having it be just another Tuesday.

My three Mylar balloons are still floating above the piano in my living room -- one still with the tape on it where it was stuck to a signpost -- reminding me of the great party I had to kick off my seventh decade of life!

I'm going with woofiegrrl and vdentata to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival tomorrow! It's held every year on the National Mall in DC, but I've only been to it once before.

( Why I haven't gone )

The cultures at this year's festival are Mekong River: Connecting Cultures, Northern Ireland, and The Roots of Virginia Culture. I'm hoping this will give me a push to make more of an effort to go into DC more often!


ADDED 11:17 pm: Meredith is really exhausted, and she doesn't need to push herself just for my sake. Unless she feels better after a night's sleep I'd rather just hang out with her and A at their house so she can relax. I'll see what she wants to do in the morning.

On Monday, someone posted a message on my church's discussion group. His wife had an unexpected business trip and he was going with her, so they wouldn't be able to attend the Australian Dinner they had purchased at the church auction last fall. It was this Saturday, March 24 -- would someone like to go in their place?

Yow! I had bid on that, but the price rose very quickly -- Cynthia and Duncan put on a different international dinner every year, and their events are well known to be wonderful -- so I had to drop out. It ended up going for $60 a person. I quickly dashed off a note, and I soon got a note back saying that I could go!

Cynthia and Duncan put on a fantastic feast, and I am stuffed! This was the menu:

Hors d'ouvres (sic):

Yabbies (Crayfish)
Shrimp on the Barbie
Peter Hehmann Semillon (Australia)

Entree:

Meat Pies
Marlborough Pinot Noir (New Zealand)

Main Course:

Australian frenched lamb ribs
Mixed vegetables
Mixed salad
Shoofly Shiraz (Australia)

Dessert:

Pavlova
Jacob's Creek Chardonnay Pinot Noir Brut-Cuvee

It was all absolutely delicious! It was a large dinner -- 18 people -- and Cynthia went all out with the food and the atmosphere. She even had a selection of Australia-related coffee-table books on the coffee-table and Australian music (well, Waltzing Matilda was playing when I got there, and once the living room got crowded and noisy I couldn't hear it any more). The food and everything else was terrific!

The hors d'oeuvre course was interesting because nobody -- including the hosts -- knew how to eat yabbies! (The name is derived from the word yabij in the Aboriginal Wemba language.) They look exactly like tiny, 3-inch long lobsters -- and even big lobsters are hard to eat! Fortunately Cynthia and Duncan have a friend who'd grown up in Australia, whom they'd invited to the dinner. She said to just eat the tail because there isn't enough meat in the rest of the yabby to worry about, and showed us how to break off the tail and pull the shell off with our fingers. She said the claws were good too, and they were, but there was so little meat in the teeny-tiny claws you could hardly taste it. The yabbies were delicious, but seemed rather wasteful! The huge grilled shrimp were marvelous too.

The lamb was served in small racks of 3 or 4 ribs each, and it was amazing! It just melted in your mouth! (I can't even imagine how much it must have cost!) The "mixed vegetables" weren't the kind that comes in the packages of "mixed vegetables" -- it was a wonderful melange of fresh broccoli, cauliflower, squash and carrots, roasted in the oven.

And the pavlova ... oh, the pavlova! I'd never had this traditional Aussie dessert before, and I never knew what I was missing. Pavlova (pronounced pav-LOH-vuh, not accented on the first syllable as in Russian) is very simple -- just a big meringue with real whipped cream and fruit -- and absolutely scrumptious. Cythia's looked just like this (except with strawberries and kiwi slices, not pomegranate seeds) and she'd made three of them, so we each got a huge wedge.

The wines were great too. I didn't care for the shiraz, but the others were very good. By the time we got to the sparkling dessert wine, though, I'd had enough and only had a few sips. I wasn't driving -- my friend Linda had gotten the other ticket and offered to pick me up -- but I'm not a big drinker and I just didn't want any more wine.

The company was enjoyable too, but the dinner was really the star of the evening!