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Part of me approaches adulthood as an anthropologist where I feel compelled to explore and understand alien rituals.  In this case, the ritual is the post-college party and it is alien because it involves the trappings of adulthood which I view with skepticism.  There is a power to making something your own and I intended to make this party my own with a reasonably diverse menu and a reasonably diverse guest list.    24 people attended and I’m glad everyone seemed to find a place to sit when they need to.  I prepared a goodly collection of foods for the evening but my guests brought more and the serving areas quickly ran out of table space, what I consider a happy problem.

I was initially worried that we’d not have anything to do but that stopped being a concern when I heard shouts of cheer from the rec room.  My guests had created a drinking game out of putting a Roomba on a pool table.  Hazaa for geeks.  Later, the large group broke up into clusters in the dining room, kitchen, and rec room while Whit, Joe, and Pat held court in the Living room.

I can think of no other way to phrase it except to say that for the first time in a while I was content when I expected to only be satisfied.  A thank you to my guests who made entertaining much easier than I thought it’d be.

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Today was the company Christmas party which followed some sort of high level meeting meaning many of the higher ups were in suits with stupid Christmas ties resulting in a look appropriate for what I’ll call “execu-caroling”.  My fellow technicians and I walked to the cafeteria and were buffeted with mediocre singing from a volunteer choir and one of their voices cut through the air like a knife.   He was a fellow with whom I worked many years ago who had fast-tracked through the company and many of us felt he lost his humanity along the way, it appears he also lost his singing ability.

The food itself was presentable and last year’s “Foods of the World” served by executives in a heated outdoor tent was replaced with chicken fingers and questionable seafood that was self-served inside our cafeteria.  A somber and half-cheerful speech was delivered by our executive and we tooled around after.  The party really got started when I started losing vision in my let eye and became very sweaty and lost some fine muscle control.  I’m pretty sure it was the shrimp but I hope this doesn’t portent a future tactic of using food-borne illness to winnow the weak from the company.  If so, I’m willing to go to Taco Bell for however long it takes to build up immunity.  Carpe chalupum.

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Driving from Chicago to home with a stop in Fort Wayne was dull, except the stop in Fort Wayne.  It’s a route I’ve done before a few times and, since I had a ticket on record in Indiana and my car was out of inspection in PA I drove in that narrow band between “normal speedy” and “driving slow enough that no significant laws are being broken but fast enough that it doesn’t look like you’re trying to hide something”.  This was punctuated by driving across Ohio where the gas was cheap and the roads were barren.  The trade off was that all the rest stops were operated by attendants stunned by customers whose prose lacked elision.  Meh.

Through the drive I was listening to the 54 part series on the History of the United States.  I hit the war of 1812 as I stopped to pick up my rental car, I can’t wait to hear how it ends.  When I got home it looked like someone had broke in and cleaned the ground floor, baked an angel food cake, used the pool table, and somehow emptied the well.  Looks like someone had a party.  Based on the 3 full recyclables container and empty well, a very active party.

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Bill Mischke turned 50 on Friday and I volunteered to help setup, this was run by his erudite field commander-like wife and AnnaMarie Pepper.  The 10 minute discussion of which table covering to use was fine, but the three rearrangements of the cake table taught me something:   Until today, I thought world’s most powerful microscope (that I knew of) was a scanning tunneling microscope that has a resolving power of about 0.1 nanometers.  This is sharp enough to see individual atoms and to resolve material imperfections that can not be directly seen but only inferred due to butting up against the limitations of Heisenberg uncertainty.  This may sound sharp, but I have no doubt that under the right circumstances the descriminating power of a middle-aged Jewish woman planning a celebration for a life milestone is at least twice this.

General Pictures

[flickr album=72157616996753060 num=5 size=Thumbnail]

Portraiture

[flickr album=72157616997002158 num=5 size=Thumbnail]

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Bill Mischke turned 50 on Friday and I volunteered to help setup, this was run by his erudite field commander-like wife and AnnaMarie Pepper.  The 10 minute discussion of which table covering to use was fine, but the three rearrangements of the cake table taught me something:   Until today, I thought world’s most powerful microscope (that I knew of) was a scanning tunneling microscope that has a resolving power of about 0.1 nanometers.  This is sharp enough to see individual atoms and to resolve material imperfections that can not be directly seen but only inferred due to butting up against the limitations of Heisenberg uncertainty.  This may sound sharp, but I have no doubt that under the right circumstances the descriminating power of a middle-aged Jewish woman planning a celebration for a life milestone is at least twice this.

General Pictures

[flickr album=72157616996753060 num=5 size=Thumbnail]

Portraiture

[flickr album=72157616997002158 num=5 size=Thumbnail]

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Date/Time: 6:00 PM, Dec 27th, 2008

Location: Pew Cottage, School at Church Farm (map), this is on the uphill side of the campus on the opposite side of the road as the athletic fields.

Cost: $10.00

Open To: Anyone who completed the 2008 camp season as a staff member or staff volunteer.

Registration: By December 26th so Dan can get food.

If interested in attending, email me so I can pass you an evite, or contact Dan Rowley.

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I encountered car trouble on the way home eventually resulting in my car dying in my drive, blocking 1/2 of it as an onslaught of costumed 20-somethings were to raid my house.  The rain thwarted our initial attempt at diagnosis so we simply opted to push the car out of the way.  During break in the rain, my brother dressed as dracula in a too small cape, his friend dresseda post-suicide Lehman Brothers Executive, my dad dressed as the world’s gayest looking pirate at me in my staff uniform dressed as…. an Ockanickon Staff member began pushing.  There were two impediments, the fact that the micro-meteorite impact zones of the moon look smooth compared to my driveway and that my dad was convinced that allowing the car to roll downhill would somehow help us push it more.  With a mighty heave my car was parked and we were cheered on by Marilyn Monroe (surprisingly helpful) as dreams of driving home inebriated slutty witches died in my chest.

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One of my Indian coworkers was planning a surprise party for a friend who’s graduating from college and was having trouble finding a track whose main theme was congratulations.  She found a track by Juliana Theory that would have been wildly inappropriate (read: hilarious if used).  This irony occurred again with The Rolling Stones, Cliff Richard, and Blue October when she finally stumbled upon one that seemed to do by some group I can’t recall.  I asked her if she thought the DJs would have the track to which she replied “they’re DJs, if they don’t have it, they just sing it”.

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One of my Indian coworkers was planning a surprise party for a friend who’s graduating from college and was having trouble finding a track whose main theme was congratulations.  She found a track by Juliana Theory that would have been wildly inappropriate (read: hilarious if used).  This irony occurred again with The Rolling Stones, Cliff Richard, and Blue October when she finally stumbled upon one that seemed to do by some group I can’t recall.  I asked her if she thought the DJs would have the track to which she replied “they’re DJs, if they don’t have it, they just sing it”.