New Biking Gear

This weekend I had a productive round of shopping for new biking gear:

  1. I bought a new helmet. It was really hard to find a large-size helmet; I kept finding Giro one-size-fits-all-helmets, which didn’t fit my head. I also wanted a blue helmet to match my bike, and a helmet with a visor, since a visor obviates the need for wearing sunglasses while riding (for me). I finally found a nice blue Bell Influx helmet at REI which fits great. I think the last helmet I bought cost me $90 or more; this one was $65.
  2. Also at REI I found a bike tire gauge. I’ve had people at bike stores tell me they don’t make those – “Why would you want one? Just check the pressure by feeling the tire” they’d say. When pumping a replaced tube with my hand pump I can’t really tell if I’ve overfilled the tire my hand, so I’m pretty happy to have found this tire gauge, which now lives in my seat pack along with my tube-changing equipment.
  3. I also picked up a couple of new tubes. Tubes are cheap, so it’s easier to replace the whole tube than try to patch the punctured one.
  4. Lastly, I bought a new water bottle, since the old one was getting a bit long in the tooth. I like the Polar Bottles.

I took the new gear out with me on my ride to work today. I was especially glad to have the new helmet, since my old Giro one was definitely, well, old. (I understand you should replace your helmet about every five years, for safety.) I liked the Giro, too, but I couldn’t find the one I wanted from them in searching for a replacement, so I’m happy with the Bell.

I got a late start on biking to work this year thanks to moving, but I’ve been going twice a week for the last month (often with my coworker Sean). I may not catch up to the number of rides I did last year, but I should have a fair number by the end of Daylight Savings Time.

Spider-Man: The Death of Jean DeWolff

Spider-Man: The Death of Jean DeWolff HC, by Peter David, Rich Buckler, Sal Buscema, Brett Breeding, Vince Colletta & others, Marvel, 2011

Creators can be a little frustrated when you point to an early work of their as your favorite. Naturally, they feel that they’ve grown and developed as a creator since their early stuff, and that their newer work is generally better. But while skills can improve with experience, sometimes other factors in an early work overwhelm the arguably-weaker craft that went into a work and make it the favorite of some of their fans.

So it is with me and The Death of Jean DeWolff, which is no-question, it’s-not-even-close, my favorite of all the works I’ve ever read by writer Peter David, yet it is (to my knowledge) his first published comics work. Some years ago I had him autograph my paperback collection at a convention, and I was a little put off that he sort of mumbled something I didn’t catch when I said how much I loved the story, and signed it with a Star Trek symbol next to his name (he was deep in the Star Trek era of his career, I think). Maybe he harbors some bad memories about the time he wrote Spider-Man, but perhaps more likely he felt a little awkward having a fan gush over his earliest work when he’s done so much more since then that he probably feels is more sophisticated and just-plain-better. I don’t know – I certainly wasn’t inclined to ask him at the time.

Nonetheless, here we are: I’m delighted to see that Marvel has given The Death of Jean DeWolff, in my judgment Peter David’s best work, the deluxe hardcover treatment.

Now, when this came out in 1985 I was not following Spider-Man, and even today I’ve never read another story with Jean DeWolff in it. Apparently she was a supporting character on the police force in Spidey’s books for a few years. But she was enough of a character in his life that when she’s brutally executed at the beginning of the story Spidey is motivated to help the police find the killer. Teaming up with wry police detective Stan Carter, he learns that a masked nut named Sin-Eater killed her, and is killing other prominent figures in New York.

While the mystery of the Sin-Eater’s identity is what initially drives the story, what makes it great is the conflicts the hunt imposes on Spider-Man: The Sin-Eater is all-too-willing to let loose with his shotgun in the middle of a crowd when Spidey’s after him, raising questions about whether Spider-Man’s partly responsible for anyone who gets hurt. (Similar issues come up in the real world when someone gets hurt when the police elect to engage in a high-speed chase.) Spidey’s fellow hero Daredevil, and his alter-ego of lawyer Matt Murdock, also gets involved when a friend of Matt’s is killed, demonstrating the contrast between the two heroes (at least, at the time): Spider-Man is a hero who works to do what’s right, but it basically a vigilante with something of a black-and-white outlook on justice, while Daredevil, who’s both a lawyer and is somewhat older and more worldly, has a more nuanced view, though one which sometimes conflicts with his own vigilante adventures. The two end up on opposite ends of a thorny ethical debate at the conclusion of the story which David handles deftly and satisfyingly. It’s a very emotional and human story, but one which would be difficult to tell with characters who weren’t masked vigilantes.

This story includes everything I most enjoyed about David’s writing: His humor is sharp and pointed, with few cheap shots, and his characterizations are vivid (several of Spidey’s supporting cast shine along the way). The plot is tight and there’s little wasted space or verbiage; the pacing is perfect, down to the issue-by-issue cliffhangers. The storytelling is helped considerably by Rich Buckler’s pencils; Buckler is something of a forgotten man in comics history, it seems to be, having been one of a number of Neal Adams-influenced pencillers (the best of them, really), but one who never illustrated any hugely popular stories. With terrific inks (mainly by Brett Breeding), he really shines here.

The one downside to this collection is that it left out David’s excellent foreword and afterward from the paperback collection (published in 1990). In particular, this paragraph has stayed with me:

[We] killed off a character who had a lot of potential. Readers couldn’t fathom why we did that, “Why kill off a character with whom you could have done so much?” Ah, but where is the dramatic impact in killing off someone with no potential? Someone who the readers are sick of? There’s no drama in that, no sense of “It might have been.” Death should be a tragedy, not a relief. Perhaps in a world where moviegoers laugh at innocent teens being slaughtered by masked madmen, that’s been forgotten.

That this story works so well even for me, who had no emotional connection at all to Jean DeWolff, both proves David’s point, and further illustrates how well he executed this story.

The new hardcover also has the 3-issue sequel to the original story (from 1987). I was disappointed in this story when it came out, in large part because it’s illustrated by Sal Buscema, of whose art I’ve never been fond (I always preferred his brother John’s style). But reading it today I think it works fine. Once more it’s about the consequences of power as wielded by Spider-Man, and about the demons that haunt a man who’s done terrible things, and whether he can ever truly be rid of them. As a sort of variation on a theme compared to the original, and bringing some closure to some matters left over from the first story, it’s a success.

This is one of the great superhero comics, and a high point for a character who’s seen plenty of them in the last half-century. Seize this opportunity to check it out.

The Strange Case of Mr. Hyde

The Strange Case of Mr. Hyde #1-4, by Cole Haddon & M.S. Corley, Dark Horse, 2011

Since Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen came on the scene a decade or so ago, there’s been a steady stream of victorian and early-20th-century comic books plumbing the depths of public-domain characters from that era. While LoEG has gotten byzantine to the point of being tiresome (the series’ “easter eggs” have overwhelmed what little story remains, as Chris Sims’ review of the second volume of Century describes), other stories have been worth the effort. I’ve particular enjoyed this little Dark Horse mini-series, The Strange Case of Mr. Hyde.

On the face of it, it’s not a terribly clever premise: There are so many real and fictional characters lurking around late 19th century Europe that we’ll probably see every possible combination of them eventually. This one is Jeckyll-and-Hyde and Jack the Ripper, but it’s done well.

Inspector Thomas Adye (a fictional character, as far as I can tell) is assigned to the Ripper case, but he enlists the help of Dr. Henry Jeckyll to help profile the killer. The problem is that Jeckyll is himself stashed away in a dank prison, after his exploits as the dangerous Edward Hyde some years earlier.

Jeckyll’s descent into depravity is shown in little pieces and in flashback, just enough to show how he was once a good man but is now a calculating lunatic. He’s a much stronger figure than the character in LoEG. Adye is also a strong character, but a bit naive and credulous, just enough so to be taken in by Jeckyll’s tantalizing promises, but also mistrustful of his superiors and feeling he needs Jeckyll to crack the case. And crack the case the pair ultimately does, but with some consequences for each of them.

Corley’s art complements Haddon’s story quite well. He has a clean style, a bit stiff at times, but a good portrayal of the period elements. I occasionally had trouble telling Jeckyll and Adye apart, as the two are each clean-shaven, brown-haired men, but that aside Corley has quite a range of facial expressions. Hopefully this is only the beginning for him.

Naturally, there’s a collection coming out. Check it out if you can’t find the individual issues.

Michael Swanwick: Dancing With Bears

Dancing
With Bears

Subtitled “A Darger and Surplus Novel”, this is the first novel I know of about the two con men, the latter being a genetically engineered dog-man, and his fully-human partner. (Maybe Swanwick’s written some short works about them?) It takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, in which our heroes have finagled their way into accompanying the Pearls of Byzantium, a group of enhanced women who are being presented to the Duke of Moscow as his brides. Ambushed in the wastelands on the way to Moscow, Surplus manages to get named the new ambassador from Byzantium, and the group picks up an energetic teenager who’s fallen in love with one of the Pearls, and a religious zealot.

Arriving in Moscow, the pair sets in motion a plan to enrich themselves, but they get caught up in a variety of machinations, both by the Pearls, and an assortment of locals who are plotting an overthrow of the Duke, behind all of which lurks an even more sinister plan to destroy all of humanity. The revolution arrives with much fanfare, chaos, and destruction.

I wonder if Dancing With Bears is named for the old saw (possibly a Russian proverb): “The wonder of a dancing bear is not that it dances well… but that it dances at all.” The book has plenty of dancing bears: Post-singularity entities disguised in various forms, Surplus and his gene-modified brethren, the Pearls, and the Duke himself. It’s a cornucopia of wonders, but set in a medieval-style world and told in the style of a fantasy, and thus very much in keeping with Swanwick’s usual work.

But while I was a big fan of Swanwick’s previous novel, The Dragons of Babel, I don’t think Bears is nearly as good. Fundamentally, while both books are set in fairly dark environments, Dragons transcends the darkness through the character of its protagonist, while Bears focuses largely on the two con men, who are worldly and cynical, entertaining in their way, but not characters you can really root for. Of the others, most of them are engineering their own complex (sometimes evil) plans, and only the boy, Arkady, feels particularly sympathetic. But he’s credulous if not downright stupid, and happens to luck into a point of redemption (and is just smart enough to recognize it), but it’s such an abrupt reversal from his earlier portrayal that it’s not very satisfying.

At its best, the book features many of Swanwick’s carefully-crafted scenes which feel like an excerpt from a fable. I especially enjoyed the bits where Darger was training another young wastrel the art and skills of being a con-man (this particular wastrel actually has the most satisfying story arc of the book). Darger, rather than Surplus, tends to have the more exciting adventures and more inventive escapes; I almost got the feeling he was supposed to be larger-than-life in this regard, but I’m not sure that’s what Swanwick was really going for.

Swanwick also heads full-speed into Tim Powers territory of torturing his characters, which is rather less enjoyable, although it does lend a sense of realism to the political environment of the city. There’s also a heavy dollop of sex and lust, often played for broad comedy.

While I appreciate the craft with which Swanwick constructed his world and set up the plot of the novel, it just didn’t have the heart that Dragons did, and the climax of the various threads was impressive but not entirely satisfying. And I think it does come down to the fact that Darger and Surplus were just not protagonists I could get behind.

Doctor Strange: Into the Dark Dimension

Doctor Strange: Into the Dark Dimension HC, by Roger Stern, Peter B. Gillis, Paul Smith, Bret Blevins, Mark Badger, Terry Austin & Steve Leialoha, Marvel, 2011

Roger Stern was one of the best writers in comics in the 1980s (he’s still good today, as his Captain America mini-series supplementing Ed Brubaker’s regular series show), and his 4-year run on Doctor Strange was his very best work (it was published bimonthly from 1981-1985 – remember when comics companies used to do that?). So it’s terrific to see Marvel reprint the end of his run in this handsome hardcover volume.

A brief recap: Doctor Stephen Strange was a brilliant but egotistical surgeon before a car accident wrecked his nerves, so he could never operate again. Wandering the Earth in search of purpose, he met The Ancient One, an eastern mystic who eventually took Strange as his apprentice. In the ensuing years, he grew to become Earth’s Sorcerer Supreme, and master of the mystic arts, operating out of New York’s Greenwich Village to defend the world against mystical threats.

While many previous creative teams (Lee & Ditko, Englehart & Brunner, etc.) had written fine Strange stories, Stern topped them all, by mixing the cosmic with the personal. Strange became a richly characterized human being, as he lost his apprentice and lover, Clea, when he became romantically entwined with another woman, and he gained friends and allies on his adventures as well as in his household (his manservant, Wong, and his accountant, Sara, developed a romantic attachment). He had some pretty great artists, too, starting with Marshall Rogers, then Steve Leialoha, and then Paul Smith, the main artist in this volume.

This story opens with a story in which Strange helps Dane Whitman, The Black Knight, throw off his family’s curse, but the story quickly shifts when Strange realizes that Umar, the ruler of the Dark Dimension, has decided that he is masterminding the rebellion against her rule. He’s not, Clea is in fact behind it all, but her persistent attacks on him force him to take the fight to her. It’s a terrific story in which we see Clea develop more fully as a character, and with a satisfying victory-from-the-jaws-of-defeat ending. The story showcases Strange’s humanity and empathy, a man who wields immense power, but who does so with conscience and wisdom. Other writers have often heavy-handedly returned to Strange as a man who achieves catharsis and enlightenment through his experiences, but Stern goes beyond that to show him as a fully mature, rounded individual, a man who still has personal and external challenges to face, but who is as much a role model as any of the mainstream superheroes who live in the spotlight that he avoids.

Stern is ably assisted by Paul Smith’s art. Smith had developed considerably from his earlier work on X-Men, but was not quite as fantastic as he would be later on The Golden Age. His stuff is nonetheless terrific. Bret Blevins does a pretty good job of aping his style in a single-issue story (itself quite good) prior to the main arc. All of their work looks terrific in this reprint, and the coloring is bright and vivid, complementing their styles perfectly.

Stern unfortunately left after the next-to-last issue collected here, and Peter B. Gillis – the series’ next regular writer – wrote the code to the Dark Dimension story, illustrated by Mark Badger. Badger’s sketchy (if not downright muddy) layouts and pencils have never appealed to me, and Gillis always seemed a very dark writer whose characterizations seemed a bit too simplistic, his stories a bit too convoluted. It’s a disappointing ending to the volume (plus it tied in to the lousy Secret Wars II series Marvel was printing at the time), and I’ve always wondered why Stern departed so abruptly.

That aside, the overall package is wonderful. I highly recommend giving it a try, and if you like it, go back and try out the rest of Stern’s run (mostly quite affordable in your back issue bins), starting with Doctor Strange vol 2, #48, and running through #67 (the last issue before this volume). There are many great issues in there, and I guarantee you’ll love it.

Bumps in the Road

Last weekend we had our second house guests in our new house, as K and her new boyfriend C visited for a day and a half (two nights) at the end of a vacation they’d be on. We had a good time, with dinner at Cascal, and a visit to the Computer History Museum. I hadn’t been to the museum since before they opened their spiffy new exhibit hall. While the artifacts on display haven’t greatly changed (other than lengthier descriptions and some multimedia presentations), the big change is that they were able to spread out the exhibits for the personal computer era from a couple of racks of hardware to several rooms of material. Well worth visiting, as always.

Two sets of house guests in two weekends is a little exhausting, though, since it means we spent a lot of time cleaning and preparing for their arrival. We enjoyed having them, but it feels like it’s been quite a while since I’ve had the time to keep up with hobbies and even home maintenance.

That was the most fun “bump” in recent days. The rest are not any fun.

Blackjack has been more subdued lately, and Debbi and I have both been worried about him. He had his regular chemo treatment on Thursday, and the vet said she agreed that something seems off, but it’s nothing she could diagnose, and that we should keep an eye on him. He did have one of his more difficult chemo treatments right before our first guests arrived, and it might be that all the visitors has thrown him off and he’s just feeling tired of change himself. Fortunately, these last couple of days he’s seemed perkier than he had the previous week, so maybe he’s getting over it. But we’re still worrying about him.

The other big bump has been that we have ants in our house. The tiny, black kind who send out little scouts and then swarm when they find things. The weird thing is that they started out in our master bedroom, and have gradually made their way downstairs. They’re in the kitchen now, and found the cat food yesterday. We’ve been dealing with them as best we can, amidst everything else we’ve been doing, but it’s been massively stressful. As with many such problems, my first concern is the cats: The ants aren’t really a danger to the cats, but I don’t want to use a treatment that will hurt them. If it was just us humans, I’d be more likely to call an exterminator to nuke the buggers.

Here’s what we’ve tried:

  1. We started by getting a soy-based spray and spraying it along the base boards of the bedroom, which stopped them from coming in for about a week.
  2. We bought some Grant’s Ant Stakes, which seemed to eventually get rid of the ants in the immediate vicinity of the stake, but they have not shown a huge amount of interest in them, so they haven’t done their intended job of destroying the colony.
  3. We’ve treated a few spots outside with a spray insecticide, which certainly dealt with the problem there, but doesn’t help indoors, since I don’t want the cats to be exposed if we can avoid it.
  4. I’ve caulked a couple of places where they were getting in, but I don’t think we can caulk every opening.
  5. Finally, after reading an article by my friend J.D., yesterday we deployed some Terro bait traps (which I’d previously picked up but not tried), which is another “kill the nest” treatment. This one the ants are quite interested in, and we’re hopeful that we’ll have J.D.’s experience and see the ants go away over the next couple of days. Cross your fingers for us that it works.

If the Terro does work, then we’ll investigate more perimeter defense to see if we can keep them from coming back.

While I don’t really hate ants, seeing them swarm around the Terro baits makes my skin crawl. I just don’t want them in the house. I can’t recall ever living anywhere that ants were a problem – it’s weird that we never had a problem with them at the townhouse, which is only half a mile away. But maybe ants are just a problem everyone has to deal with around here, and we just got lucky. I don’t know.

I thought I was dealing with adjusting to our new home pretty well, but the ants have really thrown a wrench into it. It sucks.

A smaller issue is that one of our carbon monoxide detectors (which are now required by law in California homes) beeps occasionally, and the other night about 2 am it decided to beep multiple times, but not persistently, and not in any pattern that the instructions said meant anything. So after checking things out, I removed the batteries, and put fresh ones in in the morning. No more beeps since then, but it’s annoying. (One friend on Facebook called this the “pull me off the wall and throw me in a drawer beep”.)

Lastly, we’ve started moving on selling the townhouse. My agent says it’s in good shape, and he was impressed with some of the things the HOA has done over the last decade to stay up to code. We’re doing the necessary improvements (such as painting and recarpeting, things we probably would have done soon even if we hadn’t moved), and hopefully it’ll go on the market in the next month or so. Other than a few miscommunications, this has been rather fun; but amidst everything else that’s been going on it’s been just one more thing to take care of when I’m already pretty stressed out.

Overall, I’m hoping we’ll have good progress on the ants in the next couple of days, and that my stress over them will go way down.

House Guests

This past weekend we had our first house guests at the new house: Debbi’s sister Dianne and bro-in-law Shawn flew out on Saturday. Shawn was out here for business, and Dianne tagged along to see her favorite older sister; they hadn’t been out here to visit since before Debbi and I started dating. Now, this wasn’t a new meeting for me; Debbi’s family and mine live pretty close to each other, so whenever we go back to visit our families, we each see the other’s, although we each spend most of our time with our own families. But I know Dianne and Shawn fairly well by this point. Our friends Lisa and Michel have gone back to visit them with Debbi a couple of times, too. But them coming out to visit us was a novelty, as they’re usually so busy with their kids that they don’t often travel.

They flew in Saturday afternoon, and after giving them a tour of the house, we took them out to Hobee’s for a late lunch since they apparently didn’t eat much on the way out. Then Lisa, Michel and their kids came by for a few hours and we played with Isabella in our yard, trading off running around with her. Shawn was showing her some soccer moves. Otherwise we just hung out for the day, picking up dinner to eat at home, since they were pretty zonked from their flight and the time change, and they turned in around 9:30. I think this is the first time I’ve ever had more than one house guest at a time, so they were able to take advantage of the fact that we have a queen-sized bed in our guest room now, rather than the single-person futon I had at the townhouse (although that futon is still in the living room, and is one of Blackjack’s favorite places to hang out, looking out the front window).

Sunday we drove over to the coast and had Sunday champagne brunch at the Moss Beach Distillery, sitting on their patio for a while afterwards. We didn’t actually go down to dip our feet in the Pacific Ocean, but I did stop off at the coast trail to get a different look at the ocean. Then we drove to the other side of the bay area, and hit a couple of Livermore wineries in the afternoon before coming back home. A lot of driving, but fun! After dinner (at Vive Sol) we went into downtown Mountain View for a little shopping and to show them our downtown.

Monday and Tuesday Shawn worked, but I took Monday off and Debbi, Dianne and I drove around Silicon Valley in the morning and early afternoon. Shawn finished up early that day and we headed up to San Francisco for ice cream at Ghirardelli. We hit a couple other places (like an Apple Store), but it was cold and foggy in the city, so we didn’t stay too long, and got home before dark.

It was back to work for me on Tuesday. Somehow I cleverly scheduled a meeting for 5 pm after forgetting that Tuesday was the baseball All-Star Game, but I got home during the second inning. We got take-out from FJL and watched the game.

Wednesday morning the three of them got up to oh-god-thirty to take Dianne to the airport, and Shawn headed off to work an hour after I finally got up, and he flew to LA later that day (hopefully he avoided carmageddon on his flight out).

It was great to see them, and to break in the guest room at the house. The cats gradually warmed up to them – Roulette even gave Shawn some attention (and she’s getting a little more adjusted to the downstairs as time goes on). Hopefully they can come out again sometime!

2011: A Trash Odyssey

Trash day at our new house is Wednesday. Actually it was Wednesday at our old home, too, but that was a townhouse, so we had a large common dumpster (paid for by the HOA) and I’d just take the trash out when it was ready and didn’t care about when trash day was except for the recycling. At the new place we have a couple of trash bins and we’d have to remember to take them out to the curb every Wednesday.

Well, we had a couple of trash bins, anyway.

We unloaded our storage unit a couple weekends ago, and one of my projects was to break down all the boxes for our electronic stuff. (We had boxes in there for items we no longer own!) The boxes themselves go out with the recycling, but the styrofoam packing goes into the trash. We’ve been putting our regular trash into the smaller of our two bins, while we spread the styrofoam out across 2 weeks, putting it in the larger bin. They took the first half last week, and I put out the bin with the second half Tuesday night.

Wednesday morning I looked out to see if the trash had arrived – not yet. So I went off to shower and have breakfast. I looked out again, and…

…the trash still hadn’t come, but the larger bin was gone. Just gone, styrofoam and all.

Who would steal a large trash bin filled with styrofoam?

I walked around the neighborhood a little to see if I could spot it, but no luck. I thought maybe some wacky neighbor had “borrowed” it and it would magically reappear at the end of the day. Nope. I noticed a neighbor across the street had a bin sitting out at the end of the day after everyone else had taken theirs in. Had our bin somehow ended up over there? But this morning they’d taken it back in, and I saw where they kept their bins, and there was only the one garbage bin. So much for that theory.

It was a bummer since getting a new bin costs money. (Hey, an incentive for someone to steal trash bins! But full bins?) But we figured we’d call and get a new one.

And that’s when Debbi solved the mystery: It turns out we weren’t paying for service for that bin, so the trash company took it away. Apparently the picking-up-extra-bins truck comes around separately from the regular trash truck. It’s a little weird (though nice) that they took the trash, too, but it explains the mystery.

Now we’ll have to decide whether we want to get a larger bin (and pay for it), or stick with the smaller bin. I think the smaller bin will do the job for the most part, but we’ll see after a few months whether we want to go to a larger one.

Open House

Saturday we throw what is easily the largest party we’ve ever thrown: A big open house for our new house. We each invited many of our cow-orkers, as well as friends and our new neighbors. I think we invited about 130 people, and including kids and significant others I bet we had about 80 show up (probably around a 40% return rate, since many who showed up were not direct invitees). Fortunately they didn’t show up all at once, since I don’t think we could have handled that! Rather they were spread out between 1 and 7 pm, with the last few taking off around 7:45.

We were pleased to get nice weather, especially after the heat wave we had early last week, as we planned to shunt many of the kids out to the back yard to play, which worked out well. (The only casualty was my hummingbird feeder which broke when a large ball got kicked into it at high speed. I had actually been thinking of replacing it anyway, so not a big deal.)

Before people showed up we locked the cats in the guest room (Roulette yowled vigorously when we caught her to throw her in.) I put up a “Do Not Enter – Cats Inside!” sign, along with a full-size photo of what the room looked like that morning before we threw them in, so people could get an idea of what the room looked like. Locking the cats away meant we could open the front and back doors without worrying about them escaping outside (which in turn meant no doorbells going off every few minutes to upset the cats).

Then we gave many, many tours of the house, which got the hoped-for sounds of appreciation. The seller/builder showed up with his brothers and their wives and he showed them around, and our agent showed up too to see what we’d done with the place. We had three neighbors stop in, including the fellow across the street whom we’ve gotten to know and his wife whom Debbi described as “a hoot”. We’d hoped & expected to get a few more neighbors, but perhaps many were busy on a Saturday afternoon at the end of June. (We did partly invite them just so they’d know we were having the party and wouldn’t be surprised that our guests used so much local parking, but we wanted to meet some, too!)

We used Evite for the invitations, as we usually do, but we had the odd experience this time of not only having some folks show up who hadn’t RSVPed (which always happens), but having some folks who up whom Evite claimed hadn’t even viewed the invitation, which must be some sort of an Evite glitch. The last time I used Evite I got some feedback that it was quaint that someone was still using that site, but it’s always worked for me. If it’s starting to head south, it may be time to find another invitation site for future parties.

For food we served snacks, but Debbi also made three wine bottles’ worth of sangria, which was almost completely gone by the end of the day. The hummus went over really well, too.

I was happy that my friend Rob showed up, as I hadn’t seen him since his housewarming party last year. He brought his three kids, the youngest of whom loved our stuffed animals (Sam, my giant stuffed sea turtle, went over really well with the 3-and-under kids). I think I’ve known Rob longer than anyone else other than my family, and it’s always good to see him. Even though we don’t have hordes of interests in common as we did in junior high, it always seems like we get along just as good as ever.

We let the cats out when there are only a few people left, but only Newton had the remotest interest in coming down to check things out. (Newton had spent much of the afternoon sitting in the window watching people run around in the yard.) The other two came down once everyone was gone and we were cleaning up.

It was a lot of fun, but also a long time to be standing on my feet. I switched from sandals to slippers part-way through, and then to bare feet not long after that. By 9:30 at night I was falling asleep on the couch, so we called it an early night, and a successful party. (But going to bed early meant we got up early enough to beat the Sunday brunch rush at Country Gourmet!)

Debbi’s now talking about doing this every year! Well, maybe by next June we’ll be completely unpacked.