But these were fairly nice and only about $20 each. They're folding chairs with plastic armrests and tight-woven plastic canvas for the seat and back. They're fairly comfortable, which was my only real requirement, and done in shades of sand and black, so they're relatively attractive.
It's not very often that Matt takes a stand on issues of furniture or decoration for the house. Usually, in fact, it's the opposite - he wants our things to be comfortable and functional and as long as it's not hideously ugly, he's fine with whatever I want. This time, it was the reverse - I would have even been okay with the cheap molded-plastic chairs, as long as they were sturdy enough to hold me. But Matt rather vehemently didn't want them, so I was happy to go along with what he wanted. I'm glad we finally have something, though. It won't be long before it's nice enough in the evenings to sit on the porch and watch the neighborhood kids playing.
Friday night, I made meringue kisses for K.T.'s St. Patrick's Day party. Meringue kisses are almost absurdly easy - three egg whites, a cup of sugar, a dash of vinegar and a dash of vanilla, plus whatever things you want to mix in for the fun of it - chocolate chips and green food coloring in this case.
The first batch was pretty gooey in the middle, which is wonderful fresh out of the oven, but gets stale really fast. So I decided that for my second batch, I'd use a trick I'd picked up doing my Christmas holiday baking - I'd tape a decorative icing tip to a corner of a large Zip-lock bag, and make little tiny meringue kisses. They cook faster and I like the way they turn out. You can't put chocolate chips in them with this trick, but there are always sacrifices.
The last couple of time I'd done this, I'd used a lot of Scotch tape to attach the decorator tip to the plastic bag. It worked, but the meringue would eventually work its way past the tape and get all over my hands. This time, I decided, I'd use duct tape, and hopefully the leakage problem would be avoided.
To make sure it would work, I tore off a couple of thin strips of duct tape, and carefully taped the decorator tip to the corner of the bag. Perfect! The innermost seam was covered, and I didn't think the meringue would leak anywhere else.
Fifteen minutes or so later, the meringue had been whipped into perfection. I used a spoon to glop it into the zip-lock bag, angled so it would all run down into the corner with the decorator tip. I sealed the bag, carried it over to my wax-paper-lined cookie sheet, held the end of the decorator tip with one hand, got a good grip on the bag with the other, and squeezed. And squeezed again. Nothing was coming out. I repositioned my hands and tried again...
Oh. Yeah. You have to cut the corner off the bag before you attach the decorator tip. Um. Oops?
So, carefully, I had to peel off the duct tape, squish the meringue back away from the corner of the bag, snip off the corner, and put the tip back on. One edge of the tape got curled over in this process, which eventually let the meringue through and all over my hands. But next time, I think, I'll remember to do it right, and the leakage will be even less.
Matt's watch had been dead for about two weeks, so Saturday evening, after a lovely day spent lazing around the house, we decided to go to the mall to get the battery replaced and have dinner before heading to the party. The guy at the watch place wasn't the brightest cookie we've ever met, but he didn't charge Matt for the battery, so that was all right. And while I was waiting, I wandered into Claire's (an accessories shop) to agonize over some nifty temporary tattoos and pick up some weird little hair doohickeys.
After we'd eaten (Chik-fil-A) it was still too early to go to the party, so we wandered around a little. I stepped into Bath and Body Works and had to forcibly restrain myself from buying something with their new Tangerine Spice fragrance - it smells divine, but I really should use up at least some of the smelly stuff I have at home first. I used up all my willpower walking past that display, though, because I finally caved in and bought one of their liquid lipliner/lipstick sets. As long as I was there, I decided to freshen up for the party, so I used the display lipstick, and picked up some glitter lotion and sparkled up my face and hands.
Matt laughed when he saw me, but since I'd been expecting that, it was all right. We poked around in the Waldenbooks for a while, but I didn't see anything new that I wanted to read. (Besides which, I've already got about four books at home that I haven't had time to get to yet.)
K.T. and Kevin had really dolled their place up for the party - green streamers everywhere, printed clovers and horseshoes stuck to every flat surface, and every bit of food that could be green, was. The party itself was pretty quiet, though - mostly groups of people sitting around talking.
My brother and his fiancee, Sam, came. I was happy to see them both. I wound up spending most of the party after they got there sitting in the kitchen talking to them. I felt a little bad about it, but Kevin's friends from work were talking tech, which didn't interest me, and I see most of the rest of them fairly frequently. But K.T. sat in on a good amount of the kitchen chatter, so I didn't completely feel like I was being a bad guest.
Around 11:30, the party had pretty much drained away to just John, Sam, K.T., Kevin, Matt, and I. We kept talking for a while, but I was slowly getting sleepy as I sobered up, and when K.T. whispered to Kevin that she was thinking of turning in, I took the lead and told Matt it was time to go home. Sam offered to help K.T. clean up, but K.T. was feeling entirely too tired to even want to think about cleaning up yet. Matt and I each picked up about a dozen cups and plates that earlier guests had left lying around on available flat surfaces and threw them out, collected our remaining two ciders and the empty tupperware I'd brought the meringue kisses in, and said our farewells.
Sortof. John likes to talk, so it took longer to actually get all the way to the door and out, even though he was leaving, too. I don't blame him, though - he's stuck in a conservative backwater town where a teacher was actually fired just recently for being mentioned in a public website for being Wiccan. I'm sure if any of his students' parents knew that he played Dungeons and Dragons, he'd be out of job, too. So when he comes up for visits, he talks a lot.
Sunday we spent being gloriously lazy. I think I was actually up and dressed before one, but it was a near thing. I watched about four Babylon 5 videotapes (that's eight episodes) and helped listlessly with the laundry. In the late afternoon, Matt and I popped over to the pharmacy to pick up this month's prescriptions, and I bought another hair-color kit.
I decided not to bother with red this time - everyone who's ever dyed their hair that I know uses red of one shade or another. It's been Done. So I decided I would look pretty good with dark brown hair instead of my usual medium. I waffled over the various kits, and finally picked one that's supposed to last for about 3-4 weeks. (No, I wasn't going to pick up a permanent kit. My hair is over two feet long; it would take ages to grow it all out if I hated it.)
Of course, when I got home and read the box, I found the fine print: "If you select a shade darker than your natural hair color, it will not wash out in 24 shampooings." Damn. So how long would it last, then? Six weeks? Eight? Would it be permanent? To that, there was no answer. I guess I'll see if I can call their "hotline" and find out before I do something I might regret.
I'm not really ready to be back at work today. I need about six more hours of sleep. But I've got a book, and some new weird clippy-things in my hair, and tonight's the Hall...
Word of the Day: This is a new thing I thought I'd try for a while. Merriam-Webster's website offers a Word of the Day. I thought it might be interesting if I took each day's word and wrote about it a bit, just as a writing exercise, to see what turns up. It'll always be the last thing in an entry, so if you don't care for this sort of exercise, feel free to just skip it.
Today's word is lycanthropy, interestingly enough, since I was just speaking of gaming and the Hall. As a gamer, I've run into werewolves from all angles. One of my earliest experiences with them was actually an illusion of a werewolf that my character believed was real. If the GM had been a little better, he could really have done some interesting things - make me role-play having been bitten and perhaps even going a bit mad when the moon turned full in the psychosomatic belief that I'd contracted the disease. But I was an inexperienced role-player, playing under an inexperienced GM, and panicking, and he finally gave me enough bonuses to accept the illusory nature of the beast. I've played true werewolves, in the White Wolf game Werewolf: The Apocalypse. And on the Hall, I've played companion to werewolves. At any turn, the question of whether the creature is a beast or a victim has fantastic possibilities for debate.
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