Party Prep
This Thanksgiving Weekend has given me plenty of time to get everything ready for the party despite the 70-degree evenings evaporating overnight late last week. Bummer. Now I'm hoping it will be dry. I've spent an inordinate amount of time tweaking my playlist. I want to set it and walk away. I don't want people fiddling with it. I've made additions and deletions, added more scores (only the short, immediately identifiable tracks, I promise) and dropped in a couple of handfuls of movie sound bytes dialog. I've tweaked the settings of iTunes (what there are), adjusted the EQ, and triple-checked the playlist for album art. I've decided on full-screen Cover Flow over insipid "visualization." Everything looks, and sounds awesome on this end. I'm pumped.
I anticipate most of the party taking place in the garage. We'll have one of the garage doors open allowing access to the front yard, allowing easy access to the keg (which I presume will be bone dry approximately 90-minutes after tapping it) to allow Mother Nature's assistance in keeping it iced. There will be a buffet table in the garage as well, with three crock-pots (one of them a veritable vat) of Texas chili and two of queso. Everyone's been so helpful in pitching in to ensure everything is covered. The number has swollen to nearly 50 confirmed, with the possibility of an additional twenty or thirty still unaccounted for. Yes, I could potentially have 80 folks at this party.
My wife decided the foyer would benefit from my rugs this time around. The largest middle rug was my first - I picked it up in Saudi; its my only machine-made rug. The rug to its right is a handmade rug with the weavers name (in arabic) sewn into as a signature centered near the bottom. The white highlights are silk. The one to the left of the big rug I picked up in Korea, its a handmade Pakistani rug. The other two are much smaller hand knotted rugs, both of them having been purchased in Virginia, one of them Indian made. They go somewhere different in each house I've had. I've never split them up before (I usually hang all five in a row) but I think they really invite you into the house here. The wrinkles are from being used as packing material for six months.
And while I anticipate the garage and front yard being filled with happy, drinking people - the interior of the house is not off-limits. I'm going to have several internet kiosks around the house so people can get online whenever they want to. I want them to be able to access the lj 'Guestbook' as well. Nonetheless, I took great care in getting all the unnecessary junk out of my office, vacuuming & cleaning it, and even hanging some things on the wall. I'll move in some more chairs the day of the party. We're down to the last five days, and I take my boy to Cub Scouts tonight. Time is fleeting.
