Dinner for 8

Thursday night after I got home from the gym, J and I slowly started to make dinner.  He prepares the food for the grill, I saute the veggies...  In the middle of snapping the end off a green bean, someone knocked on our door.  Amidst the dogs barking their heads off, I peeped through the peephole and saw it was one of our first floor neighbors.  (The neighbor that we weren't entirely sure liked us as much as his roommate).

 

Of course we welcomed him in, the perfect host and hostess that we are (flashback: me, in sweaty gymclothes with a tousled ponytail.  J: I'll just say thank goodness he had pants on).  What happened next is kind of blurry in my memory due to hunger pains and the fact that I'd ceased reading New Moon just long enough to make some green beans.  Neighbor Jeremy, who we'll now call Jer (that's for you, Gib), starts talking about grilling and grills and can we grill and do we have a grill and you get the picture.  It ended up with J telling Jer that yes we have a grill, and it's on, and we're getting ready to throw a few steaks on it now.  Jer says something to the tune of "Do you mind if we grilled some veggies on it?"  He says he's got food downstairs and that they'll bring it up.  I say, "Sure."  I didn't catch his use of plural pronouns.

 

So he left, and J and I were just as confused as we'd been when we opened the door to see a guy who hasn't necessarily expressed his love for us yet.  Five minutes later he and a girl showed up with 2 grocery bags of food, a huge bowl of potato salad, 2 boxes of Boca burgers, and an unopened bottle of Southern Comfort.  Five minutes after that, three of his friends showed up at our door with beer.  Five minutes after that, one last straggler shows up.  Total: 8 people.

 

In what might've seemed like an act of antisocial behavior, J and I sat at our dining room table and ate our dinners while our neighbor and his posse hijacked our balcony.  They were drinking beer, they were laughing, they were not at all acting like this was an odd situation.  Our dining room table is right by one of J's fishtanks so two of NeighborFriends came to look at it.  They're a married couple.  They have African Cichlids too.  The talked with us for quite a while about it.  They also have a new puppy that they rescued.  Ok, we like them.

 

Flash forward two hours.  All 8 of us are standing in our kitchen (which makes me laugh because my old kitchen had a max occupancy of 1.4 people) laughing at one of J's animated stories, as Mary and Leo entertain us all.  Turns out 2 of NeighborFriends work with Jer at the Botanical Gardens and they offer some advise on our budding herb garden on the balcony.  They loved the dogs.  Showered them with love and treats.  And all in all, when it was all said and done we had a lot of fun with them**.  We joked afterwards about why anyone would invite friends over for a cookout if you don't have access to a grill.  Totally random and spontaneous.  And it completely made me appreciate how clean our place was.

 

After all, you just never know when you're going to host someone else's dinner party.

 

**The married couple had a friend in town.  An extremely tall girl, like towered above the rest of us.  At one point when we were all in the kitchen, she bent over and then slowly crumpled to the floor.  It was the weirdest thing I'd ever seen...don't think I've ever seen anyone faint before***.  I gave her some water, someone reached into our cabinet and handed her a bowl.  I'm assuming it was her for to puke in, which hello, gross.  She just sat there saying she thought she'd been food poisoned (she ate a veggie burger) and how she then said it was sun poisoning.  It was very odd.  And she didn't even want to leave then either; they stayed another hour.  Her friend's husband said later that "Guess the air's thinner up there."  I said, "Where?  Here on the 3rd floor?" and he goes, "No, when you're 6 foot 7."

 

***Retraction: sophomore year in college J-Gib fainted due to a massive allergic reaction to amoxicillin.  That day took 9 years off my life.