Mm, weekendy goodness.

Saturday, while Penny was taking her nap, Matt turned to me and said, "Hey, instead of bringing Christmas presents to Kris's birthday party, we could call and see if they want to get together to do that today."

"Sure," I said. "If you want, we could invite them over for dinner."

Matt was on the phone to Braz within seconds. After some conference, he turned to me and said, "They want to know what to bring."

"You're kidding. I haven't even decided what to make yet."

As it turned out, I made chili.

And then while I was doing the math to figure out how bad that was going to be for my diet, and whining to Karen about it, it occurred to me that I could use ground turkey instead of ground beef. I mean, between the tomato sauce and garlic and chili powder, there's so much flavor in there that the use of beef in chili is pretty subtle as far as flavor goes, and mostly provides texture.

(I said this at dinner while we were eating, and Matt and Braz both gave me a very dubious look. "The purpose of putting meat in chili," they countered, "is that it is meat.")

So I tried it, and it worked out very well, indeed. Being white meat, it looked a little odd, but it tasted just fine. Which is excellent news, because I love chili when it's cold out, so being able to fit it into my diet is excellent news.

Anyway, Penny had a lot of fun playing with Emma and (to a lesser extent) Sarah, and the rest of us enjoyed some actual adult interaction for a while, and a good time was had by all.

Sunday was Kris's birthday, with a lunch at the local Chinese buffet place that currently occupies most of one side of a strip mall.

So I blew the diet (I can't just eat one plate of Chinese food, and I can't resist hibachi noodles, and I have no idea how to count calories in buffet food, so it's safer to just assume that I blew it). But we had fun, and Penny was well-behaved despite the fact that we were postponing her nap until after the lunch, and all was good.

And then we went home, and Penny took a bit of a nap, and Matt and I had salads for dinner to sort of reduce the damage of the Chinese lunch, and we watched a couple of episodes of Buffy, which was exactly the right sort of silly fluff entertainment to round out the weekend.

All in all, a very good weekend, without an excess of Twoness from Penny, and lots of fun happy moments.

I'm hoping this week will be a little calmer than last week. Coming back from a vacation always results in a backlog of work, but I think I've got things mostly under control now.

Today will be a little crazy, because the Monday managers' meeting always makes my morning feel truncated, even when it only lasts an hour. And that will compound because I'm going out to run a couple of errands. But the rest of the week looks like it's almost back to normal.

I might even (dare I say it aloud?) find a little time to do some writing.

--Liz