Yesterday was Valentine's Day, the Chinese New Year, and President's Day weekend all wrapped up in one. So of course we had a party:
Don't be impressed: I got both the dragon and the Obama picture at the party store. You can be impressed by my outrageously good freehand-cut hearts. I made those with scissors. I rule.
We also had a few decorations from our wedding shower lo those many years ago, so I hung them around:
Those are so pretty I'm just going to leave them there for a while.
Also, we had a minor miracle. Somehow we invited 23 people over and everybody said yes, so we needed more chairs. We went and bought some at IKEA, but we were still going to need to borrow chairs, when one of our neighbors set some perfectly nice chairs out at the curb. Noel dashed down the street and picked them up, I washed them, and we had enough chairs for a very weird dinner party. (Actually, we ended up running out of tables, which is a bit harder to compensate for.)
Anyway, it was fun, but it was too many people. My dinner party brain can only keep track of the needs and desires of guests up to about ten, and above that it's more like "there are many people here, wow."
Now we have a week's worth of dishes to run through the dishwasher (no, we were never in danger of running out of dishes), and Noel put in a special request to just go out to eat tonight rather than cook anything after two solid days of cooking. After that, I'll be eating leftover pasta and meatballs for a week or so.