Another Week Down: Tale #1: Party

Faithful Reader, the busy-ness of the start of the school year has had a negative impact on my ability to diarize on-line. Also threatening to derail my blogging plans for today is the temperature of our house this morning: 55 degrees! I can barely move my fingers to type! We've been enjoying a week of intermittent rains and cool temperatures, so we've been able to cool down the house by leaving the windows open at night for the wonderful experience of hunkering down underneath a down comforter while cool late-summer-evening breezes dance across the duvet cover and the tips of our noses. It has warmed up to 47 degrees outside so far this morning, but it's still a chilly biscuit out there, and I finally shut the windows so that we won't develop pneumonia (and so that I can get the blood circulating again in my extremities). But if you're here reading, you deserve an update on the fascinating events of the Mobergs' lives, so I'll brave the weather to give you one. Here's the first of several tales from the past week:

Last Saturday evening we went to a barbecue hosted by people we don't really know. Jodeen, one of Susan's coworkers at church, invited us to a party at her house to celebrate the 25th wedding anniversary of her and her husband, Jerry. Once we arrived, we were immediately glad to have chosen to attend. For one thing, Susan was one of just a couple church coworkers who attended, so she was glad to be there to "rep-ruh-sent" (I'm so gangsta). For another, Jodeen and Jerry's extended family were very welcoming and friendly, and we had no problem making their acquaintance and visiting all night long. For yet another, their family does food at a family gathering the way the Mobergs do food:

1. estimate how much total food you'll need for the number anticipated to attend and then prepare three times that amount;
2. knowing that two or three choices of beverage would be enough, instead lay out five or six iced coolers filled with over a dozen varieties of pop and alcohol;
3. for the main dishes, lay out one buffet line overflowing with at least two meat dishes, some kind of bread, pickles (dill, of course, but perhaps also home-canned sweet), and numerous "salads": some pudding- or Jell-O-based sweet mixes with fruit and Cool Whip and some Miracle Whip- or Ranch dressing-based savory mixes with macaroni and vegetables;
4. for the desserts, lay out another buffet with its own plates to accommodate "a little of everything" from the wide variety of sweet treats: as the centerpiece, a sheet cake baked and decorated by a local woman who has made her name as the go-to baker for weddings, high school graduations, and church confirmations; and surrounding the cake, a plethora of pans of bars, most all of which contain chocolate chips (either within the batter or melted and poured on top as a frosting), cake mix, breakfast cereal, or cream cheese frosting
5. prod the guests throughout the evening to go back for more . . . and if they don't, pick up the bowls and trays and take them to the guests, setting them randomly on the picnic tables and card tables scattered about the lawn

Jodeen and Jerry served a large pan of deep-fried turkey and a huge roaster of barbecued pulled pork to stack on buns. Their salads included a potato salad made by Jodeen's mother and an acini de pepe salad just like the recipe that was one of my mother's favorites! Their cake was a moist marble with a real-butter frosting delicately decorated in the colors of their original wedding decorations. The woman who made the cake was the same woman who made our own weddding cake 15 years ago! Ours was delicious, too, and it served about 400 . . . and cost us only $75! Gotta love western ND.

(In eastern ND, we discovered that the food spread at a family gathering was more likely to feature store-bought salads and a cake made by the local grocery store: a dry, flavorless marble sheet cake decorated in "better cream" [a misnomer, I tell you] frosting that felt and tasted like whipped lard. I can't even imagine what the grocery stores there would charge for enough nasty cake to serve 400.)

While Susan and I were meeting new people and visiting non-stop over our plates of food, the girls were off making friends with other kids, both their own age and high school-aged. They must have befriended some adults, too, because at one point, a woman got everyone's attention so that we'd stop talking and listen to a musical performance . . . by our daughters!! Mind you, they did not arrive prepared to sing, and they don't even know that song. But there they were, holding the sheet music for "The Rose" and singing along as the woman played the song on a CD softly in the background. Susan and I just looked at each other, thinking, "How did this come to pass?" Leave it to our kids!

We arrived as strangers but were some of the last dogs to leave (typical of Mobergs to drag out an exit--who wants the good times to end?!). Jerry and Jodeen live in southwest Dickinson in an area of the city that I'm not familiar with, so on our way home, we took a longer-than-necessary route home just so that I could drive around their surrounding neighborhoods and gander at the homes. The day had been very, very hot and windy, but it cooled down nicely by the time the party started, and the cool breeze made for a very pleasant evening out on their lawn. We're glad that we went and got to know Jodeen and Jerry--and their family and friends--better.

(And that we got to eat all that delicious food. I am a Moberg, after all.)