My Husband's 40th Birthday Party

I've had so many parties lately that I haven't been able to keep up with posting them all!  I know, this is the kind of trouble to have!  I'm going to try to get them posted as much as I can.

I didn't get great photos of my husband's party because, well, honestly I was having so much fun that I forgot!  We had a great time!  Friends we see every day were mingling with friends we haven't seen in years and we were reminded just how lucky we are to know such amazing, fun and interesting people!  This party came very soon after our daughter's 5th birthday party (which I have yet to post photos of), and in the middle of planning for a big "Voodoo, Vodka and a Van Ride Home" party which took a LOT of work.  I tried to make it lovely without killing myself.  I was intent on ENJOYING this one, and not being totally strung out before it even started - I managed a little of that.

Marc's favorite dinner is cheeses and breads and spreads and bites of different things.  So I ordered a GREAT local artisanal cheese plate from Elephant's Deli.  They always do a beautiful job, although they forgot to include the cards telling us what kind of cheeses were what and where they were made (very upset about that).  Also from Elephant's was a salami plate and various yummy crackers and dips and things.  His other favorite?  SUSHI.  We had a giant platter from his favorite sushi place.  Food? done.  I made a few little desserty things that were a snap, and NO MORE cooking.

I adore a good cocktail, and I like to feature one or two at every party.  They tend to be on the 'girly' side, so I found a French 75 recipe that was incredibly yummy AND was Hemingway's drink - can't get more cigar smoking, crony talking, manly than that!

We have a little house, so I set up different drink 'stations'.  The pomegranate cosmopolitans in  martini glasses on the built in in the dining room:

And the French 75's in champagne glasses on the other end:

We also had different local wines, so I put the glasses and bottles in the kitchen eating area:

Marc included his favorite local beer - LSD - in a keg from Lompoc, so we had beer glasses in the kitchen.  Our Lego master snuck in and out during the day "embellishing" the glasses:

Homer Price and His Doughnut Machine

My son's class was reading Homer Price

in his first grade class and they decided they MUST act the entire thing out, and Mr. H. of COURSE volunteered to make the doughnut machine for the play!  He assured everyone it would be SO easy and even built a model for us to follow:

With some help from his dad's recycling room at his office and a pinkie swear that the machine would NOT return to our house after the play, we set to work!  We first watched this video from youtube.com to understand the scope.

This is only part one, and there are THREE parts if you are so inclined.  We weren't.  But we did watch enough to build the doughnut machine out of cardboard!

The kids did a GREAT job with their play!  And someone ELSE got to take the machine home!  Win, win!

HARVEST!

I went out to trim back some of the poor veggies who have been just SLAMMED with rain in the last couple of weeks (please oh please let the rain stop and my garden have a chance to grow!!!) and I found these radishes poking RIGHT OUT of the ground!!  They are lovely.  And they were delicious!

And there was this lovely spinach that I sauteed with garlic from the recipe here:

That huge amount of spinach was enough for ONE side for ONE dinner, but still!  It came from our garden!!  It was a small accomplishment, but an accomplishment nonetheless.  My son, who likes NOTHING, even gobbled it down.