Sudden Social Schedule

Our social schedule has blown through the roof top this past week! For myself, it is commonly comfortable to sit at home reading novels and drinking tea and exchanging some laughter with Brian. However, last Thursday our social schedule started off with a bang! with our Spaghetti Night in NZ, which was awesome. Brian and I put tea light candles in jars along the dark steps up to our front door. The candles looked so beautiful... Once everyone arrived, we started cooking - and what a meal it was! Spaghetti noodles with two types of sauces to choose from: traditional tomato sauce or green-goopy looking pesto (it tasted better than it looked).

The funniest part about the whole night was the lack of dishes, or better said, the ingenious use of other non-traditional serving dishes. Sweet Bella ate her pasta out of a Pyrex measuring dish (I'm positive the handle was extra handy), and she was lucky enough to get a fork (I didn't get so lucky and ended up with only a spoon), and to top it all off, she got to cuddle into the one and only ugly blanket.

Two nights later, all the Canucks in Nelson celebrated an early Canada Day at Dallen and Ginnie's place (my boss at Kathmandu). The idea of the whole night was Canadian food, music, and the colour red. Dallen made some pretty stellar burgers on the ol' barbecue, and played some cd's including Tragically Hip, Moist, Barenaked Ladies, etc... It was kind of like a flashback from the late nineties, except for the fact that all the people at this party were in their thirties.

For some Canadian food, Brian and I brought two rather strange things: homemade brownies and homemade eggnog. We figured we'd go for something original that no one else was likely to bring. We were correct in our assumption. No one else brought homemade eggnog, that which actually tasted A) just like the eggnog you buy in the store, and B) pretty darned good. Call me naive, but I didn't know that one of the key ingredients in eggnog is raw eggs. Go figure. It's kinda gross to think about, so I try not to think about that when I'm drinking it. Few people at the party knew what eggnog was, at least the non-Canadian groupies anyway - I guess eggnog may not really be "Canadian", but it feels like winter here and I will always remember that winter + eggnog = good times. With a small cup of the nutmeggy sweet stuff left over, Brian and I took it home and had eggnog coffees the next morning (oh boy, so goood).

Other people brought chips and dips and vodka. Classic.

The lighting was very low, so I didn't capture many photos of the Canadians and our Kiwi friends in midst party-dom, but I did manage to score a good pic of (from left to right) Stacy, from Victoria, BC and Sarah, a native Kiwi.

Brian and I left a bit on the early side because we were both still trying to get rid of some nasty cold bug we caught the week before. The rest of the gang stayed up real late watching the Americas Cup sailing race.

The next evening, the whole gang went out to a pub called The Prince Albert, where the deal of the century was a three course beef roast special on for $13 a plate. Naturally, we couldn't say no, so we joined in and listened to a live jazz band while drinking locally brewed beer and eating tasty beef roast, slightly overcooked veggies and Yorkshire pudding that had an odd aftertaste similar to fish and chip batter (hmmmm.... wait a minute...). It was fun, but at the end we were ready to retire to bed and let our bellies digest all the food we jammed in.

Two more days of work later, a bunch of us girls had a girls night, where we ate pizza from Hell's Kitchen (pretty good pizza, and they have fun with their name in the phone book as it just says "HELL 0800-666-111"). We watched a chick-flic and ate chocolate covered almonds and drank Sarsaparilla (a.k.a. root beer).

And if that wasn't enough, tonight we are heading to Stacy's place for our second weekly Spaghetti Night in NZ, except this week we are calling it Perogie Night in NZ. I'm heading over later this afternoon to help Stacy make the perogies (I've got some Ukrainian perogie-making-skills in my blood), Brian and I are bringing homemade German bread, and Dallen is bringing his famous borscht. Goodness, this is going to be good. I don't know if I can handle all this social activity. I'm craving a good book, the ugly blanket (gasp!), and a warm mug of tea... But, heck, there's no way I'd miss out on homemade perogies.