Gatherings

Yesterday we went up to Dan and Deb’s for an open house celebrating their new house (it’s rent-to-own). It was a nice time – lot of the neighbors came, which was nice for them. It was kind of a crowd and kind of loud, which was not so nice for me. There was a lot of food – probably shouldn’t have hit the carob-covered pretzels quite so hard.

After we’d been there a few hours, Mitch took off to kidnap Gloria away from some law project she was working on, and we and David’s parents met them at the Weber Grill for dinner. That was a very nice meal – THIS time I didn’t order a big heavy meaty item.

Last time we were there, I pretty much ate too damn much, because it’s one of those red-meat restaurants that encourages you to load up on the high-fat extras – bleu cheese for the steaks, garlic mash potatoes, and so on. I ordered a Shiraz from Australia called “Woop Woop,” and it lived up to its name – very good, very big flavor, worth wooping about. I had a grilled beefsteak tomato salad with balsamic vinegar dressing and some crumbled bleu cheese. Also, some little steak skewers with really thick teriyaki-BBQ dip. It was not a huge meal and just what I wanted.

After the meal, they gave us some more packets of spice rub – we still hadn’t used up the ones from the time before, so tonight we tried it on some grilled chicken. Verdict: one packet was WAY WAY too much for the small amount of meat we had. I should have used about a quarter of the packet for both of us.

I skipped church this morning – stayed up late last night and was just too sleepy. Next week, back to more normal hours -it’ll be at 10:30.