Yesterday was more than a little full. It started with lots and lots of house cleaning. Jan and I were going out to the theatre with friends and they were coming to dinner beforehand for sort of a birthday celebration. Then Grace and I dashed off to her last soccer game of the season. They won two to nothing, which is pretty typical for the season they had. They ended up in second place on goal difference. We and one other team ended up with 8 wins one loss and one tie. But they had a LOT more goals than us. (Plus they beat us - that was our one loss).

Then we raced home, helped Jan with more cleaning and some awfully fancy looking cooking, then off to NaNoWriMo at Papillon. Lots of people there this time. Even though Jan bailed out and went home to cook, there were ten people writing and two people from the CC Times - a photographer and a reporter. The coffee shop had arranged for them to come. They interviewd the woman who is the CC organizer and they interviewed me and they interviewed one of the women there who turns out to already be a published novelist and they interviewed Grace. Then we all wrote pretty furiously for while.

Then I ran and got bread and olive oil for the dinner, dropped kids and laptops off at the house and went to pick up the kids' trophies for finishing second.

Back home again in time to help with the last of dinner.

The menu was:

Appetizers:
Melted brie with cranberry sauce
Grilled portabella mushrooms with goat cheese
Satsuma mandarin and persimmon slices wrapped in prosciutto
olives
crackers

Main course
Crown roast of pork stuffed with wild rice, rosemary, prosciutto, ground pork and mushrooms
(basted during roasting with a whole bottle of chardonnay)
roasted seasonal vegetables (beets, onion, butternut squash, pattypan squash and more)
braised dinosaur kale and spinach

Dessert
salade de fruits aux petits femmes
celebratory cake

Even better than all this, Grace and Amelia acted as hostesses and waiters. They greeted the Atkins' and Benjamins' at the door, served them drinks, waited at table and made the whole thing a LOT more fun and fancy.

The food was absolutely spectacular.

Then the adults all went to the local theatre to see 'The Last Night of Ballyhoo' which was pretty decent for a small town theater but also rather strange and a little surreal.