Highs and lows, Oct. 10th edition

Highs:

This week was pretty uneventful, but the weekend was fantastique. It shall hereby be known as The Weekend of the Dinner Party. Saturday night my whole family gathered at my grandmother's to celebrate that good news I mentioned before. I brought over a bottle of Veuve and we spent hours laughing and talking over hors d'oeuvres and dinner, wine and champagne. It was all very Italian (though I have no Italian in my family line), but the weather was beautiful and it made for an excellent backyard soiree. Good food, good conversation, good people. Then Sunday night my friends and I had an informal dinner of wings and beer at B's house. We got to see B's new engagement ring and see all her pictures of Europe, and I hope she liked the bottle of Moet that my husband and I bought as an engagement present for those two crazy lovebirds. 

As you can see I'm a sucker for celebrations. (Whether or not there's something to actually celebrate.) And I'm really getting into this whole "dinner party" thing. Does that mean I'm getting older? Wiser? Barhopping no longer appeals to me (and stopped appealing to me a couple years ago. I much prefer heading over to a friends' home with a bottle of wine and dessert, or have people meet at my place for a (hopefully) gourmet meal.

ANYWAY, my other highs were a couple highlights from spending way too much money this weekend:

BOOTS!!!

The coolest cheese spreaders EVER from Sur La Table. Let the wine and cheese parties commence.

Low:

Friday morning my husband and I were walking up the metro stairs to get to the street level when I saw cops up near the top of the steps, roping off part of the with police tape. Mind you, we work in a REALLY seedy area of this city that shall be deemed Anonymous. In this part of town it's a normal occurrence to witness homeless people vomiting on sidewalks in the middle of the afternoon, or watch homeless women relieve themselves in walkways in broad daylight. So.

"Oh god, someone probably just died on the steps or something," I said, motioning up at the police tape.  Once on street level we pass the area the police had cordoned off....and there was a gigantic pile of diarrhea on the top step. HUMAN diarrhea. I had to force myself not to throw up. The police had the guy (who was so beyond homeless, his bare feet looked like they hadn't seen a pair of shoes in a while, they were all calloused and gangrened) in a gurney chair next to the disgusting mess. I think what happened was that the guy had dropped trou and sat on the top step to go, as though it were a toilet, and now I'm permanently scarred with the mental image of seeing the aftermath.

Stupid job, putting me in these stupid situations daily on my way into work. I'm never, ever going to walk on those part of the steps again. ...Not like it matters, I'm sure that's happened on every single step of that Godforsaken metro stop. Ugh.