The notes from my party last Saturday
In short, it was a success. I needed not have feared that it would be slow. Nor was it wild and crazy (not my preference either). Just... intense, in a peaceful way. The ACA, CFI and FACT groups mingled pretty well.
My house interior was pronounced "sparse" and "underfurnished". Well, perhaps it appears so because there's really a lot of open space downstairs; however, our couch is rather humongous. There was enough seating to fit all (or most of) 20 guests if they so chose; however, they spent most of the time standing around, making me wonder if I should work on feng shui of my place. :-)
The wine tasting! Now I know, to my relief, that you can wing a wine tasting even if you know squat about wine. As tah interwebs told me, there are millions of ways to do a wine tasting; some of them require you to be able to tell, based on a sip of wine, whether the particular year in the particular region where the grapes were grown was dry or humid -- stuff like that. Of course, that's way beyond me. But then there are more democratic ways to taste the fermented juice. For example, you and your guests can try to guess which wine is the cheapest and which is the most expensive of the bunch. (This has to be a blind tasting -- you cover the bottles with brown paper bags, so no one will see the labels.) It often produces unexpected results. The cheapest wine turns out not to be the one everybody hated, and the most expensive not the one most people liked best.
That's assuming that people vote the least likeable wine as the cheapest, and the best as most expensive. Some people employ the opposite logic, especially if in their experience pricy stuff does not taste good. That would be renegade500, who guessed the most expensive wine correctly on the basis that it was awful. ;-)
All 6 of the wines were the same type -- in this case Chardonay -- so as to compare apples to apples. (Or, as somebody put it, cider to cider. :-))
The results, as predicted, were counterintuitive. The cheapest wine, a $5.99 Little Penguin from South Australia was deemed the most expensive by the greatest number of people (7). The wine that gathered the next biggest number of votes as most expensive (6) was actually the most expensive -- an almost $40 bottle of AdAstra. So the results aren't consistently nose-thumbing. :-) But in any case there wasn't a big correlation between the price of wine and how much people liked it. As another example, the wine voted the cheapest was actually the third most expensive.
And yes, I spent more money on this party than I would have liked. Afterwards I contemplated virtues of potluck and how maybe I should do that next time (whenever that might be). I don't feel popular enough, though, to expect a huge turnout if I ask people to bring their own food. ;-) Not having a good idea how much food I'll need, I went overboard and was left with a huge amount of leftovers. A lot of products remained unopened, so the next day I took them back to HEB for a nice refund.
But all in all, it was good. The evening was so lively that -- and this is the first for me! -- I hardly had time to take pictures! Well, I took some anyway, but my new camera is such a disappointment. Face tracking, my @$$ ! This camera was advertised as being able to automatically focus on people's faces! And all I get is a damn blur! I'll blog about it some more one day. Maybe it's as simple as me not using the right preset scene. But if I buy a point-and-click camera with a million of preset scenes for every unlikely life's situation (such as "Aerial" or "Fireworks"), then by golly, I want it to do the right thing when I set it to "Party" and press a button! If I wanted a camera to fiddle with, I would buy an SLR! (Which might be a good idea, seeing how well Jeff's pictures turned out on his SLR.)
My house interior was pronounced "sparse" and "underfurnished". Well, perhaps it appears so because there's really a lot of open space downstairs; however, our couch is rather humongous. There was enough seating to fit all (or most of) 20 guests if they so chose; however, they spent most of the time standing around, making me wonder if I should work on feng shui of my place. :-)
The wine tasting! Now I know, to my relief, that you can wing a wine tasting even if you know squat about wine. As tah interwebs told me, there are millions of ways to do a wine tasting; some of them require you to be able to tell, based on a sip of wine, whether the particular year in the particular region where the grapes were grown was dry or humid -- stuff like that. Of course, that's way beyond me. But then there are more democratic ways to taste the fermented juice. For example, you and your guests can try to guess which wine is the cheapest and which is the most expensive of the bunch. (This has to be a blind tasting -- you cover the bottles with brown paper bags, so no one will see the labels.) It often produces unexpected results. The cheapest wine turns out not to be the one everybody hated, and the most expensive not the one most people liked best.
That's assuming that people vote the least likeable wine as the cheapest, and the best as most expensive. Some people employ the opposite logic, especially if in their experience pricy stuff does not taste good. That would be renegade500, who guessed the most expensive wine correctly on the basis that it was awful. ;-)
All 6 of the wines were the same type -- in this case Chardonay -- so as to compare apples to apples. (Or, as somebody put it, cider to cider. :-))
The results, as predicted, were counterintuitive. The cheapest wine, a $5.99 Little Penguin from South Australia was deemed the most expensive by the greatest number of people (7). The wine that gathered the next biggest number of votes as most expensive (6) was actually the most expensive -- an almost $40 bottle of AdAstra. So the results aren't consistently nose-thumbing. :-) But in any case there wasn't a big correlation between the price of wine and how much people liked it. As another example, the wine voted the cheapest was actually the third most expensive.
And yes, I spent more money on this party than I would have liked. Afterwards I contemplated virtues of potluck and how maybe I should do that next time (whenever that might be). I don't feel popular enough, though, to expect a huge turnout if I ask people to bring their own food. ;-) Not having a good idea how much food I'll need, I went overboard and was left with a huge amount of leftovers. A lot of products remained unopened, so the next day I took them back to HEB for a nice refund.
But all in all, it was good. The evening was so lively that -- and this is the first for me! -- I hardly had time to take pictures! Well, I took some anyway, but my new camera is such a disappointment. Face tracking, my @$$ ! This camera was advertised as being able to automatically focus on people's faces! And all I get is a damn blur! I'll blog about it some more one day. Maybe it's as simple as me not using the right preset scene. But if I buy a point-and-click camera with a million of preset scenes for every unlikely life's situation (such as "Aerial" or "Fireworks"), then by golly, I want it to do the right thing when I set it to "Party" and press a button! If I wanted a camera to fiddle with, I would buy an SLR! (Which might be a good idea, seeing how well Jeff's pictures turned out on his SLR.)