Grandiose Plans

This weekend, we made a valiant effort to deal with the pile of wedding gifts that had taken over the living room (as opposed to say, just throwing them onto the ever-increasing pile and hoping that I would wake up one morning and find that the magic elves had somehow organized my life for me). We got new shelves for the kitchen. We cleared out a bunch of old stuff and we found places for most of the new stuff. I called up a bunch of people and convinced them they needed to take all my old wine glasses. Unpacking 28 Crate and Barrel boxes turned out to be a bit hazardous. C&B uses some sort of environmentally friendly packing material. Each item is packed in about 18 layers of it, and they all have to unwrapped individually. The stuff has sort of a waffle weave to it and the edges of the waffle have a tendency to rip your skin to shreds. That was a lot of fun. (The waffle weave was also really nice when I was unwrapping a broken pilsner glass since it allowed the 4000 shards of glass to cascade to the floor like a sort of waterfall. A waterfall that makes you bleed).

During this whole cleanup process, I realized something. We now have a lot of lovely stuff we will probably use only very rarely. In the first flush of enthusiasm for the registry list, we put all sorts of fun things on there. And people bought them for us. So now we have a panini grill, a waffle iron, an egg poacher, and a hand blender. I’m not even quite sure what a hand blender is, but Lord Kissington really wanted it (it seems to me that it’s awfully similar to a hand mixer, which we also received).

The only solution I can see is that we will have to have a brunch party. This is going to be a new thing for me; I’ve never had a party that started before 3 p.m. But it will be fantastic. I will serve you tea with my new tea set (made with water boiled in my new kettle). You will drink mimosas from the new champagne flutes. Or if you prefer just plain juice (but if that’s the case, you probably wouldn’t be at my party), I can break out the new juice glasses. I’ll poach eggs in the new egg poacher. I’ll serve waffles from the new waffle iron. I’ll even bake muffins with my new muffin pan (but don’t be surprised if they’re not very good because I’ve never made muffins before). You will eat off the new china and use the new flatware. You will be totes impressed with my culinary skills and my bright shiny new objects. You will be awed by my hostessing skills. Or you know, something like that.