Dreaming of lime gerbils in a cheese sauce

All the great people who were at my birthday party today. You made it a great party, all of you!

For the record:

9.5 bottles of wine consumed as good enough to drink

4 bottles of wine declared "bleh" to "meh" to "vinegar!"

(This is a mix of bottle sizes from 250ml to 750ml)

ljtourist did a fantastic job on the food. It was really numalicious. Several of you contributed as well and there was much goodness to be eaten.

thanks everyone for coming and making it such a great day.

Er, I mean, Snow falling on ... well, never mind.

I hosted a chocolate party tonight. I bought a fountain before Thanksgiving in 2007 but didn't have good instructions so didn't use it then. I finally broke it out tonight. I melted over 4 lbs of chocolate. I think we went through just over 2lbs of it. Wow.

My guests were challenged to bring things to dip in the chocolate. I also went out and got two cheeses (yes, cheeses, and they worked damn well, I must say. Especially the truffled pecorino. Oh wow!)

Guests brought everything from bananas (which they then bruled :) and apples to bruchetta to candied ginger to cherries & strawberries. I also made my 4-chocolate Death by Chocolate brownies (dipping that turned out to be hard, the brownies didn't want to stay on the skewer).

I put several bottles of wine outside to cool down. We only opened one - the lillet - but it wasn't very good. :( However, the other four got a nice 2" cap of snow on them.

That's right, it started snowing during the party. It's beautiful outside right now. Sadly, the snow spooked my guests and they all left by 8pm in case the roads were bad.

I had an absolute blast. Now I have to figure out what I'm going to do with 2lbs of chocolate (with a bit of oil, that's how you make it flow in the fountain) and some left over dipping items. Hmm. maybe another party tomorrow night?

One sadness, while I was cleaning up all the chocolate I kept imagining how much fun it would be to have a boyfriend to share all this liquid chocolate delight with. Ah well.