MWNews 52

We have the van back. It is not running and probably needs a new engine, but we managed to get it home to the driveway so we can figure out what to do with it. Enough about that though.
I am having trouble with this new format for the blogger. It I use the old method, posting from Picasa, it does not format it correctly. If I publish directly from the blogger itself, it works ok but since the two products are owned by the same people, Google, I would think they could get this straight. So, if the format changes from post to post, then it is not my fault. I haven't figured out how to control it yet.
This picture is from Juanita'a party. I am going to start this post talking about that and I thought you might like to see some of the weird people who turned up. In this picture, there is Maeghan, Juanita, and Juanita's mother, Beverly. Now you can have an image of the person who sends you all those emails, or the ones that get forwarded from Juanita that originally came from her. She usually dresses a bit differently, but the hair is hers.
Juanita's party came off pretty well. There were about forty or fifty people here. The weather was ok, not too hot. I had a ton of food. We were still eating it for a week or so. I spent three days cooking for the party, getting everything ready. I had planned on cooking most of the meat the day before and then just putting sauce on it and heating it up in the BBQ, but that didn't work out. The original plan was to cook in my smoker. If I have not mentioned it, it is like my old smoker in America, only much smaller. It is about half the size and I have had it almost a year now and have never been able to cook on it. It requires wood to cook. I tried charcoal, but it would just not get hot enough in the cooking chamber. They use a really cheap grade of BBQ briquets here and they don't start very fast, they take forever to get to a cooking temperature and then they only stay there for about 15 minutes. I have found some hardwood charcoal that I am going to try, but it costs $17 a bag and is not really practical for cooking long term. The smoker requires wood. I don't have any wood and unless I want to pay about a lot of money for a small amount of wood, I will have to buy it in bulk. Which, I have no place to store, so you see my problem.
I was going to buy the really expensive wood just to cook for the party, but they instituteded a fire ban on the day before the party. I think I have mentioned those before in that for a complete fire ban, they do not allow any kind of smoke anywhere, even if there isn't really a fire. For a partial fire ban, they only allow gas fires. We had a partial fire ban a few days before the party and I did not know when they would lift it, so I decided to use the gas BBQ.
Even then, I was going to cook the day before and do the reheat with sauce thing the day of the party. But, I never made it. I cooked and cooked and cooked. Five cakes, three different kinds of dip, little quiches, roasted nuts, raw chopped vegatables, lots and lots of stuff. So, on the day of the party, I had to start cooking everything on the BBQ. I got up at about 3 in the morning to finish up the deserts. I was so tired from that, that around 10, we went to the shops to get some ice and I went along to have a coffee and relax. We got a call around 11 that people were starting to arrive. They were not suppossed to be there until 4 or 5 that afternoon, but a lot of them were coming from out of town, so they began arriving as soon as they got into town. We headed back and I started cooking.
From 11:30 until almost 4:30, I cooked meat. Lots of meat. I had two different kinds of chicken wings, two different kinds of ribs, four different kinds of sausage. I might have finished before the bulk of the guests arrived, but I ran out of gas about halfway through. It was a good time to have a break anyway and I ran down to the store to refill the gas bottle. Also slowing me down was the amount of 'help' I was getting. Everyone wanted to jump on the BBQ and cook the meat. I politely said no each time, but it took saying no every 5 minutes to five or six people to get the message across. I know you might be thinking I could have used the help and anyone can turn meat on a BBQ, but you have never seen an Australian BBQ. There idea is to set every on fire and when the fire burns out, the meat is done. It doesn't matter what you have to do to get the meat to burn, put petrol on it, through it in the fire, as long as it catches fire at some point during the process, everything is how they like it. I stay away from the BBQ when someone else is doing the cooking as I cannot help but cringe when I see the process.
As I was using a lot of sweet sauces and marinades, I thought it best that I leave that part of it to me. I am sure they would have but the sauce on, had it catch fire immediately, and then when it was a blackened coating on the meat, removed the meat and claimed it was done, when what really would have happened was they had burned all the sauce off and the meat would still be raw. So, I spent 5 hour cooking it.
Now, if I do say so myself and I often do say so myself, I make some mean ribs over here. I used to make some mean ribs in America, but that was real ribs and not the country style ribs they have over here. Here, they do not really even sell the kind of ribs we would be used to, so there is not a lot of point in going to great lengths to find them. Even if they sell them, the aussies would blacken them to a crispy cinder and they would not be worth the effort anyway. So, when I say ribs over here, I mean the big meaty, fatty, maybe with a bone in them and maybe not, what we would call country style ribs in America. I have not been able to cook then in my smoker yet, but I am sure I will be able to make what is currently one of the most popular things I cook over here into a straight from heaven, mouth watering, make your momma cry rib that will not only fall apart when you look at it wrong, but will have the smoky taste of real America BBQ and I can begin to convert a whole country to what it means to BBQ!
But I digress. I mention this rib phenomanon because I was busy doing some other things while the food was being set out for the party. I was taking a shower since I had not had one that day. I did take some extra time, but no more than 15 minutes, and by the time I came out and was ready to get something to eat, all the ribs were gone. I had 20 pounds of ribs. Over a hundred of them, and it was the first thing everyone went for. I found out later that word had spread about how good the ribs were, even though I did not mess with the sauce like I usually do and it was a little inferior to me. Several people came up to me and mentioned that they had been told about the ribs and they had lived up to the expectation, but I did not get a single mouthfull. I even tried to steal one off of Juanita's plate but she caught me and I had to give it to back. We had chicken wings and sausages left over for days, but not a single rib. I am not sure how this word of mouth thing started, but next time, I get the first lot off the grill and the others can wait until they are served.
We did have a lot of alcohol at the party. Not as much as I thought we would have, but then again, I drank at least a half a case of beer during the day. I had started when I first started cooking the meat and it seemed that anytime anyone noticed I did not have anything , they would bring me another beer. I don't really know how much others had to drink. I know a few of them only drink wine and I did not see a lot of that and there did not seem to be a lot of hard liquor around, other than something they were drinking called cowboy shots that smelled so sweet, I don't know how they could manage to drink it. But, I do know they went through at least four or five cases of beer, if not more.
I did not see a lot of Juanita during the party. She was with one group or another and it seemed a lot of the men wanted to talk to me. I have no idea why. We know how talkative I am and expecially when I have something else to be doing. But, everyone seemed to want to ask me questions all the time. About everything. Work, computers, sports, computers, living on the ocean, computers. You get the idea. Everyone has a problem with their computer and they think I know how to fix them. It gets to be too hard to explain each time, so I have just started making things up. Most of the people have no idea what I am taking about and if they do, they seem to think I should know what I am doing, so they agree with me to make it look like they know what they are doing also. There is one fellow, the husband of one of Juanita's friends from Brisbane, who has working in networking for as long as I have worked on mainframes, so he startes some really long conversations that I really have no idea what they are about and we seem to have really long discussions about something neither of us is really understanding. But people see us talking and seem to think we know what we are talking about and come over to listen, then wander away when it immediately gets over their heads and they don't understand what we are saying. Neither do we, but neither of us admits it.
I did make a speach during the party. I had it all worked out what I was going to say and as I remember it, I didn't get to most of the things I wanted to say and had planned out, probably the alchohol, but it seems a lot of people were impressed by it and made comments to Juanita's for several days afterwards. I don't really remember what I said but everyone seemed to like it and I gave Juanita her eternity ring during the middle of it. Juanita was embarrassed, which was really the point of making the speach, but she loves her ring and she seemed to like the speach.
Since this was Juanita's 40th birthday, I did make a point of telling everyone that she was officially older than me now. A lot of people seemed puzzeled by this, but I assured them that I was going to be 39 next year and she was a year older now. That seemed to put them straight.
I know I have gone through this whole post and not once mentioned the kids. That is the real reason for this blog, to keep people informed of what is going on with the kids all the time. But, I look at it this way. When the kids grow up and they go back to read through some of the things they said and did that I recorded here, they will get to see what their mother and I did when Juanita officially turned 40. I have not idea what we can do when she turns 50, but I suppose I should start planning that one now.
I will mention that both Maeghan and William had a ball during the party. Maeghan had a lot of her little friends there and they all wore fairy costumes. I have a picture of it and was going to use it at the beginning of this post, but I couldn't resist showing the world a picture of Beverly before she put on her party outfit. I am sure she will enjoy knowing that everyone who reads this will know what she is like on a day to day basis.
William loved all the attention she had, being passed from one person to another and always getting everything he pointed at. I know he spent a lot of time trying to get onto the table, but since this was before he started walking, he couldn't stand up to see what was up there. The next day was William's christening and the party was supposed to be his birthday party also, but since we had already had one on his birthday and we had another one the next day for his christening, I am sure he did not miss out on anything.
For his christening, we had another party at the house. Most of the same poeple came and I had to cook a lot more food for them. I had the leftovers and made some little wraps. I had planned on cooking more sausage but never got aroung to it as I fell asleep during this party and Juanita was left to deal with all the people. I was really tired from the day before and my back had started hurting sometime during the process, so I lay down to rest it and immediately fell asleep and didn't see most of the people arrive or leave.
I was awake for William to open his presents. He loved them all and Maeghan helped show him how to play with each and every one of them. She is good that way. If either of them gets a new toy, Maeghan will spend the time needed learning how to play with it before she lets William have a turn. She does this so she can point out all the new features and all the things that you can do with the toy so William does not have to waste his time figuring this stuff out for himself. She is a good baby.
Well, now that I have used all this time talking about Juanita and myself, I have wasted your time in trying to find out new news about the kids. Sadly, you will have to wait until next time I feel the urge to type endlessly on this tiny little keyboard before you can get any new news. I will go over the Christmas show and all the things the kids received for Christmas. That should be fun. So, until next time.
Talk to you later