Yesterday wasn't exactly my lucky day.
I scheduled one of my Japanese-speaking meetings for yesterday. The reason I do them on Wednesday after a day of work is that during the basketball season I have games on Thursdays, and I do not miss (Euroleague) games. So I scheduled it for yesterday. There was good response, with 10-15 people RSVPing. Which meant I should make a pile of food.
So yesterday at about 15 my best friend Z, with whom I always watch the games, sends me a message saying "Sorry, this storm is too much for me, I come today". And I started to reply "Wait, it's Wednesday, the game is tomorrow", but I always check my facts before I send an SMS, so I checked at the team's website, and the game was moved ahead one day. Meaning I scheduled my meeting to an inconvenient day to avoid a clash with the game, and it clashed with the game.
At this point of the day, of course, I couldn't call it off. Not with this number of people coming. So I had to give up the game - for the first time in I don't know how many years.
Well, I came home early, and started preparations. Basically I had vegetables to make antipasti, and I cooked potatoes and fried onions in advance to make fried mashed potato patties. So people started coming, and I've just finished mixing the mashed potatoes and onions, and lighted the gas range under the frying pan. It lights up, but only for five seconds, and goes off again.
And then I remembered that the gas company had this safety check three weeks ago and demanded that we fix the problems within 21 days or the gas will be disconnected. My landlady said she was taking care of it and negotiating with them, and I did send her a reminder after a week. But obviously, things were not fixed. I went down to the back yard to check, and indeed, they took the thingamajig that connects the canisters to the pipe away - to make sure nobody can reconnect the darn things in case they know how.
I sent an SMS to my landlady, but of course at 1920 PM there isn't much she could have done about it. So instead of sitting with my guests and having fun, I tried to find a way to make those patties in the oven. It sort of worked, but was a complicated process and far from perfect. So I gave up and ordered pizzas, and put the vegetables in the oven (which I planned to serve later, because they take 50 minutes to bake).
Did I say there was a storm yesterday? The pizzas turned out after more than an hour and a half (it's not one of the 30-minutes-or-we-pay-up pizzerias, it's a good quality Italian restaurant), and in the meantime my (13) guests had to settle for a few burnt up oven patties, the antipasti (after a long wait) and a few bags of commercial snacks I had lying around. My dignity as a hostess is in shambles. When the pizzas came they attacked them voraciously, poor guys. :-( At least they acknowledged that they were better pizzas than Domino's.
And now of course I had to set gas technician appointment during work hours, which my new boss is going to just love, especially after the cat issues a couple of weeks back.
So yesterday at about 15 my best friend Z, with whom I always watch the games, sends me a message saying "Sorry, this storm is too much for me, I come today". And I started to reply "Wait, it's Wednesday, the game is tomorrow", but I always check my facts before I send an SMS, so I checked at the team's website, and the game was moved ahead one day. Meaning I scheduled my meeting to an inconvenient day to avoid a clash with the game, and it clashed with the game.
At this point of the day, of course, I couldn't call it off. Not with this number of people coming. So I had to give up the game - for the first time in I don't know how many years.
Well, I came home early, and started preparations. Basically I had vegetables to make antipasti, and I cooked potatoes and fried onions in advance to make fried mashed potato patties. So people started coming, and I've just finished mixing the mashed potatoes and onions, and lighted the gas range under the frying pan. It lights up, but only for five seconds, and goes off again.
And then I remembered that the gas company had this safety check three weeks ago and demanded that we fix the problems within 21 days or the gas will be disconnected. My landlady said she was taking care of it and negotiating with them, and I did send her a reminder after a week. But obviously, things were not fixed. I went down to the back yard to check, and indeed, they took the thingamajig that connects the canisters to the pipe away - to make sure nobody can reconnect the darn things in case they know how.
I sent an SMS to my landlady, but of course at 1920 PM there isn't much she could have done about it. So instead of sitting with my guests and having fun, I tried to find a way to make those patties in the oven. It sort of worked, but was a complicated process and far from perfect. So I gave up and ordered pizzas, and put the vegetables in the oven (which I planned to serve later, because they take 50 minutes to bake).
Did I say there was a storm yesterday? The pizzas turned out after more than an hour and a half (it's not one of the 30-minutes-or-we-pay-up pizzerias, it's a good quality Italian restaurant), and in the meantime my (13) guests had to settle for a few burnt up oven patties, the antipasti (after a long wait) and a few bags of commercial snacks I had lying around. My dignity as a hostess is in shambles. When the pizzas came they attacked them voraciously, poor guys. :-( At least they acknowledged that they were better pizzas than Domino's.
And now of course I had to set gas technician appointment during work hours, which my new boss is going to just love, especially after the cat issues a couple of weeks back.