The New Year Starts Off with a Bang! (And a whimper)

Okay... so here's what we've been up to since my post for Music Monday. Starting fifteen years ago, when I was pregnant with C, D and I have hosted an annual "family" New Year's Eve party. Originally, we had international foods, played games, etc., but over time we mostly have good food and good friends yacking away upstairs, with the kids taking over the downstairs for games, movies, their version of good food (ie. cookies, chips, etc.). It's a lovely tradition, and we enjoy it. We wanted to have a setting where families could celebrate together and not worry about people having too much alcohol, etc., and where it was okay for kids to be tired, and for families to leave early if they wanted/needed to.

One problem is that during our many homeschooling years, we made lots of friends who live quite a distance away. As it so happened, this year the main folks who were coming all lived over an hour away. And despite the casual nature of the event, it still takes several days to prep. So we'd done the prepping Friday, Saturday and part of Sunday (minus my New York Times orgy on Sunday afternoon), and here's how our day went Monday: we were at the store at 7:00 a.m., I had chili cooking by 10 a.m., and then a friend called at 10:30 and said, "What about the storm?"

And I said,"What storm?"

Yeah.

Right.

So the storm was supposed to start at 7:00 p.m. (same time as our party) and get progressively worse over the evening, and drop 8 - 12 inches. Not. Good.

So with much calling back and forth with the traveling players, we reluctantly canceled the party with the thought that we might reschedule for this weekend, since we had so much food ready to go. And since one of the families who were coming were our new Italian neighbors, we called them up, explained the situation and invited them for a real dinner that night instead. They were delighted and so were we.

We had great conversation and a fabulous combined menu - I put out my cheeses and nut mixes for hors d'oeuvres, which I served with Kir Royales (and sparkling juice with raspberries in champagne glasses for the kids), and for dinner we had my friend C's wonderful ravioli gratinee, my white chicken chili with beer cheese bread and salad, and C's tiramisu, with our cookies and clementines for dessert. The kids had a great time together and even A's mama, who doesn't speak any English, enjoyed the evening. (I brushed off my few Italian phrases and it all worked fine).

At the end of the evening, we put a load of dishes in the dishwasher, decided to do all the rest of the clean-up in the morning, and trundled off to watch the ball drop. The ball dropped, and we dropped off to dreamland.

The next thing I knew, I heard C's (DS, this time, not my friend) voice saying, "Mom?"

I woke up to check the time, but my clock's numerals weren't visible, ie. we had no power. Which would be fine, but... that meant we had no heat and no water. And a house filled with dishes and dreck from the night before. And three guinea pigs, who can't tolerate cold temperatures.

So, at the risk of this blog entry becoming way too long, I'll speak of the next set of adventures tomorrow. But suffice it to say, we finally have our power back.

Happy New Year!