Friends and Neighbors

The second Thursday of the month is when I arrange the Business Watch Meetings for the Media District. This is sort of like a neighborhood watch meeting, but for businesses. Officer Washingon, one of the senior leads for our area, runs the meeting and together we plan out different topics and guest speakers for each month. I send out the invites and get the food and drinks. Usually I get Subway sandwiches but once in awhile I change it up, and today I decided to get Daphne's greek food from the West Hollywood Gateway (Target) center. Everyone loved it! Our guest was a fireman from LAFD who specializes in emergency preparedness so he talked about that; what to do after an earthquake or other disaster, etc. It was very informative.
After work, I rushed to the grocery store because tonight I was having a dinner party with our downstairs neighbors, Dominic and his girlfriend Andria. I had picked out a recipe from Rachel Ray's cookbook, Montalcino Chicken with Figs and Buttered Gnocchi with Nutmeg. I was also going to make one of my old standby's, Fried Basil, Tomato and Bean Salad. For desert, I had planned to make a half-batch of the chocolate chunk cookies I had made last weekend, with vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce, but in the store I saw these Red Velvet Whoopie Cakes that were already made and looked so good, I figured it would be much easier if I didn't have to make cookies from scratch since I was already on a tight schedule. I got a little before 6 and they were supposed to be coming over at 7!
Dylan cleaned and set the table while I was preparing dinner, and it ended up going much faster than I had thought. The Rachel Ray book was called "30 minute meals" but those always take me longer than 30 minutes. This one actually was pretty close, all together I think I spent 40 minutes on it. I did the fried basil salad first and let it marinate while I did the main dish.
Our guests arrived just after 7pm and I was able to talk to them while I finished up the meal.
We all sat down to eat and everything turned out to be delicious! I was so happy with it. It turns out that Dominic and Andria love to cook and had recently put together their own custom cookbook with family recipes; they had made most of the the dishes and photographed them in the book, and each recipe had a story behind it printed in the margin. It was an amazing book and I was just happy that the meal I made had hopefully been impressive enough (I think it had).
For desert, I warmed the caramel sauce and drizzled it over the red velvet cakes and the ice cream, so of course that turned out delicious, and we had each brought a bottle of wine or two so we had great fun. After dinner, we played records (Dominic had brought up a crate of them) and talked.
They went home sometime around 11pm and I went to finish my projects on the computer. I was able to finish "Hunters of the Night" pretty quickly because it was already so close to being done, and I also finished the video for the remix of "Rock Hard." Then, I took the disk Luther had dropped off with the Valentine's photos of me and Dylan, AJ and Amy, and Robin and Michelle. I thought I had seen some easy way to make an audio slideshow for YouTube but I couldn't find anything and finally resorted to using iMovie, which really makes it more complicated than I needed it to be. I was up until 1am trying to finish it, practically falling asleep at the computer anytime I would have to wait for it to finish a step.

Hello 2010, goodbye junk!
NEW YEARS RESOLUTION LOG ENTRY 42
Army green "Top Secret" tank top. I got this from my friend Jen back when she was known as Jendra and danced with Shitting Glitter. She had tons of clothes that she never wore and sometimes she would let us take ones that we wanted. I loved this tank top although it was always super tight on me. It hasn't fit me for years now.