Lots of Food, Fewer Friends

The week didn’t start out on a jolly note as Wednesday we got up at 5:30 to over the bridge to the mainland for the first time since a year ago February.  However no fun as it was to Plymouth so the dentist there could finish the two root canals she started on the Cape last week.  She had great difficulty locating one of the roots and had to use a 3-D scanner to find it She only successfully numbed 5 of the 6 roots, but the 6th hurt like hell.

Anyhow, the temporary she put on them came off the next morning while I was eating soft-boiled eggs.  My own dentist, Olga, came in on her day off to create a new temporary and glue it on to last two weeks, when she will start on the final repairs.  The whole process is expensive but I have to save my teeth.

We gave our first party since 2019 Saturday late afternoon into the evening.  I’m writing this Sunday as we had to clean the house before having people over.  We had part of the upstairs bathroom floor replaced on Thursday and since it was a rainy day, they did all their sawing on the sun porch.

We used to have 22 or so guests for the Derby Party.  We only invited seven friends from our bubble.  I made Israeli chopped liver, our grav lax, shrimp with my cocktail sauce, three cheeses and a Trader Joe’s chicken hors oeuvres from just before everything shut down.  Tash and Stephanie brought chicken satay on little skewers, Dale and Stephen brought a potato red caviar platter, Gigi and Ralph brought grilled salami, Karen made Mandelbrot for dessert.  I thought there was way too much food for nine people but guests fill on the food as if they hadn’t eaten for a month.  Almost everything was eaten.  A lot of mint juleps were drunk, a whole big bottle of bourbon gone.  It turned out everybody present said they liked the small party better so we’ll top it off at ten or eleven next year. 

I was rooting against Essential Quality as he is owned by a sheik who if his daughters seem to be becoming independent sends goons after them and imprisons them.  I liked scrappy little Medina Spirit before the Derby.  I kept telling the woman who drew his name from the hat that he was a good horse.  If I were actually betting, I’d have lost because I’d have picked Rock the World.

Today I’m going to plant some flowering begonias in a pot.  After I finish the house laundry -- load of towels, then a load of sheets—I will get the pumpkins from the little greenhouse.  They’re more than ready to go into the lower garden down by the road.  I’ve revised ten more chapters of THE HOUSE AT HOPE’S END.  They didn’t need nearly as much work as the first ten, so I was able to find time and energy to write two poems.