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Success.  Fed: seven people.  Served: wine and cheese, pumpkin-barley soup, cucumber-peanut-coriander Thai salad thing, tofu-peanut-pimento thing from Senegal, almond cake with coffee-chocolate icing (many hyphenated dishes).  Guests: one tree-hugging environmentalist law student cycling friend, one opera-singing military man, one concierge, one socially liberal politically conservative engineer/pilot, one rugby player, one guy from Southie (who I never met before).  Cleaned by hand: seven wine glasses, seven cutlery sets, four massive pots, six large mixing bowls, seven small serving bowls, seven smaller serving bowls, seven plates, various sundry cutlery items, all surfaces in kitchen (in addition to all floors in apartment, completed before guests arrived).  Bluders: three of five guests having allergic reaction to cat, lack of matching wine glasses for all guests, lack of dessert plates.

Realized: life is good.

Following my little gathering, I cleaned.  Then, I started taking pictures of my apartment.  50 pictures later (all of them crap), I had assembled my tripod, put the wheels back on my bike, mounted it on the stand, and was trying to take artsy-fartsy pictures of it.  However, as my tripod is missing a piece (I'll be hogtied, painted green, and dancing the boogaloo if I know where it is), improvement in camera-steadiness left something to be desired, since I was just holding the camera on the flat surface of the tripod rather than actually mounting it.  Anyway, if you want to see a little bit of where I live, they be here.  This includes a picture of the terrorist kitty.