rdm_ation

I just finished watching 'How To Train Your Dragon' at long last. It was so adorable.
Toothless ♥
The quote in my title is my favourite. I cracked up, and this was in the first minute or so.
Pretty great way to cap off an awesome week, I must say.

The biggest event of the week was most certainly the dinner party. A while ago

snuggle_monster and I had decided that we wanted to put on a dinner for some of our friends (well, it turned into mostly my friends but SHHH) and I can't believe the date we picked came around so fast!So anyway, after some delays (she lost her keys ... oops) she got here at midday on Tuesday, and we got into the business of cooking everything - interrupted by d&m chats about anything and putting up my Christmas tree. After all of that, people started to arrive, bearing drinks and in

pebblegosling 's case, a playlist that 'poops mistletoe'. I really do love how my friends all just get along, but more on that later. Food!
I has photos. Well, once we remembered. So none of main course, that was gone far too fast for that =P

For entree, we had biscuits and dip and cheese, and then spinach and cheese pastries (that actually weren't made with spinach at all shhhh) which despite all our best efforts were still being made when people arrived.

Then came main course, which consisted of honey-mustard chicken, Mexican lasagne (tortillas, mince, salsa, cheese, etc etc), baked vegetable frittata with rosemary (that took far too long to cook XD) alongside a cabbage and noodle salad (better than it sounds, promise), a carrot and pesto salad and potato salad. There was lots of food.

Dessert, of course, was amazing. We were fairly impressed with our efforts on that regard. Firstly, I made raspberry sorbet. And then forgot to take it out of the freezer to soften a little.

We ate it eventually...

Then, of course, the Baileys cheesecakes. They ended up much more potent than they were meant to be, because snuggle_monster happened to use a spoon that was about double the teaspoon it was meant to be when letting the baileys soak into the base. Still good though!

A strawberry, kiwi fruit and cream Christmas tree! Amazed it actually stayed together (it involved a packing a colander with the fruit and then upending it - could have been a disaster)

And finally, the snuggle_monster friendly cake (has more of a ring to it with her real name...) We were overly excited about this one. It was delicious, and she's almost allowed to actually eat it. *nods*
Apparently talk of it had reached my work. Which made me grin like an insane person. I was greeted with 'why weren't we invited to this party,

a_new_divide said there was amazing cake'
It's made of 70% cocoa Lindt chocolate, bananas, almond meal and sugar. Nom nom nom.

After we'd finished gorging ourselves, a couple of people had to go home (epic sadface from me) and then the rest of us ended up drinking champagne, giggling about all sorts of things.
Examples:
1. snuggle_monster and thalia03 do a brilliant Kath and Kim impression (or rather Prue and Trude from the show, but still)
This lead onto one of my other friends commenting that she can't listen to Mozart's Requiem with a straight face any more because of its use in the telemovie. Which led to all us musos ending up in helpless giggles because one should NOT laugh at that piece under any circumstances...
2. pebblegosling is an Arashi fangirl. Thalia03 used to be a j-pop fangirl, and is now ashamed of that. Watching their reactions while having a discussion of said topic? PRICELESS. Wish I'd had a camera on me at that point, the contrast between thali03's groans right next to pebblegosling's looks of utter glee was utterly hilarious.
3. The abovementioned pair also managed to sway/dance (ish) perfectly in sync at one point. *shakes head* no idea how they did that
4. That conversation lead into one about androgenous Asian people. XD Classy, we are.

At some point we cleaned up and migrated upstairs, where the muso talk continued. And in pebblegosling and my case, Glee fangirling. Snuggle_monster and my other guitarist friend from my old uni went off into guitar-speak, and were totally oblivious to pebblegosling's adaptation of 'Part of Your World' into a song about the fandom involving the Kurt/Blaine pairing from Glee. I, on the other hand, doubled over with laughter.
We then settled down to sleep, and somehow ended up in an oh-so-stereotypical nineties sleepover formation of the five of us in a circle formation with our heads in the centre, playing 'would you rather' with the addition of an iphone app to make things more interesting. It amused me no end that while we had ready answers for the more disgusting/serious questions, we debated very seriously the merits of being a starfruit or a pineapple with a hat.

We were pretty darn pleased with ourselves over how the night turned out.
*grins*

Here, have a photo of me - I didn't know that it was being taken and I ended up loving it. Not sure why =)

On Wednesday, I had an Exeunt rehearsal in the early morning - pebblegosling and I went back to play for our school's speech night as it was it's 90th anniversary. After which we headed back to her place and were oh-so-cool and waited for the Glee livestream to appear. Yep. Not obsessed at all.
Cute ep. This is already too long, so I'll just say Brittany is cute as all hell, Beiste is awesome, and Kurt and Blaine need to resolve all the sexual tension already. I then raced home to clean (mum's part of the deal about me hosting the party...) before heading back into the city for a last-minute rehearsal and then the night itself. It was fun! Which isn't something I normally say about Exeunt. I headed back to pebblegosling's place for the second time in a day with my harddrive to steal more videos and such, before catching the last train back home and crashing. I didn't even realise how exhausted I was until the weird zombie dreams I had while napping in the middle of the day on Thursday.

Backtracking a bit here, I had the first Sound of Music rehearsal on Sunday night, and I had absolutely nothing to worry about. Seems like an awesome bunch of people, and here's hoping I have a chance to hang out with them after some of the shows. The music isn't too bad either, just a few awful keys...
In other violin-related news I covered for a uni friend's teaching job yesterday, and realised again how much I love it. I need to look for a decent teaching job as soon as I can. Pay's great too.

Kudos if you got that far!
Rdm

PS Most of the recipes we used were from here. You're welcome.