Happy Wheel Tank Trophy

Thursday night, we had my brother and his newly acquired wife over for dinner. We're starting a tradition of taking each other out to a nice evening meal instead of buying gifts for each other that we don't need one jackass bit. It's nice. We (as in both my brother and I -- and our spouseseses) get to dine out all fancy-like. Given that all four of us have birthdays once a year, then we're guaranteed to scope out some new restaurants and cuisine occasionally. This tradition started way back in 2004, so we'll see if it makes it one entire year -- which makes it official -- for 2005.

We're already trying to screw the whole thing up, actually. Thursday became my brother's birthday dinner night. It got postponed from last month because of his new contracting job in New York or some nonsense. Since we couldn't land a sitter for the girls on that night, we opted to cook dinner instead of going out. Even though they agreed to it, I was opposed. But, what are you going to do? The dogs can't watch the kids. They're terrible with responsibility. What sold me were the words, "Baked" and "Ziti", spoken by my beautiful wife. Ya-hell yes we should have dinner at home.

Violet truly is a wonderful cook, but with 2 kids in the house, and an actively growing start-up business on her hands, along with all the other crap-o-lah that she deals with on a day-to-day... she just doesn't have the time. Anyway, she found time to put this baked ziti together on Thursday. She didn't just use what was on hand around the house either. She went and got awesome cheeses, spiced Italian sausage, fresh rosemary from our yard, and you get the picture. So, the table was throttled with a great 4-person dinner. Salad, bread, fresh parm, wine, yum. Our 2 guests show up and we dig in.

This is where the distinction between knowing those people with kids and those, well, not so much. Baby screaming and small-ish 2-year-old needing much attention. Violet and I each trying to maintain a level of dining-out type conversation with our guests while still handling baby spit-up on the shirt and flaring tantrums. It was comic and I tried to keep as much of a smile as I could while my brother and his wife say things like, "Wow, good thing you only had two", and "You guys probably don't go out much, do you?". No. No we don't.

Anyway, the evening was fun, but I got the feeling from everyone that we wouldn't be doing that again. I happily concur. Now? Baked ziti left-overs. Kick ass.