Guess Who's Coming for Dinner?

I meant to get this posted sooner, but between being busy and sick (I have an icky cold), I didn't get around to it.

Saturday night's spaghetti dinner was a big success, at least from my point of view. I'm hoping everyone enjoyed the food, although Mr. Too-Honest Hiyoshi told me my sauce didn't have a lot of flavor. Well, I think it might have been because he'd taken some allergy medicine so being around the cat wouldn't kill him, and likely he couldn't taste things very well. I think next time I cook for him, I won't ask him how it was! He did eat two pieces of garlic bread and two pieces of Kahlua cake, though.

The guests of honor were Dino, Drummer Extraordinaire, and his lovely girlfriend, Carrie. When I got here to Taiwan, I told him I'd cook spaghetti for him, and it's taken almost a year to actually manage to do that! It was a little strange cooking such a big meal in my little kitchen, and real Italian sausage is nowhere to be found in Taiwan (ah, perhaps that's why my sauce didn't suit Mr. Picky's taste), but I managed to turn out a huge pot of sauce with minimal effort on my part. Thanks to my buddies Cheryl and Steve, who obligingly carried hard-to-find items with them when they came to visit, I was also able to provide decent salad dressing and not the ubiquitous 1,000 Island crap that is all one can find here, unless one wishes to pay an exhorbitant amount of her rapidly dwindling cash at the "foreigner" supermarkets.

Also attending were Natari and Charlene, so in order to accommodate six people, I had to use the table in the office and two of the office chairs. I thought at first I could squeeze us all around my one small table, then I recalled just how big a guy Dino is.......nah, wouldn't work. It was nice to finally be able to use the pretty dishes I bought here, but I should have also gotten some placemats. Dang, some hostess I am, huh?

What's a dinner without some spirits? Natari had stashed a bottle of wine at my place last March, so she finally got to drink that, sharing it around with Dino, Carrie, and Hiyoshi. I was sticking to tequila, with a mixture of almost-margarita made with Cuervo Gold, Grand Marnier, lime, and orange juice. It was pretty tasty. Hiyoshi and Dino finally had some, but I drank most of the half bottle that was used that evening. Charlene behaved herself, sticking to soda for the duration of the dinner.

We had a great time chatting (well, OK, listening to Dino talk). The guy is funny, I tell ya, funny. He has some great stories to tell, had us laughing a lot. Here's how Wu Bai's band got its name (because you know, they were a band on their own before Wu Bai came along and hooked up with them): Dino and Xiao Zhu were sitting around talking. Dino was speaking probably a mixture of English and a little Chinese, and talking rather quickly, because that's his style. He was telling Xiao Zhu how he felt about Taipei, saying it was like a "jungle land." Xiao Zhu said, "Zhongguo lan?" (that's Chinese for "China blue"), and Dino said, "Yeah, a jungle land." "Zhongguo lan?" Dino repeats, "Yeah, jungle land." He sees Xiao Zhu is obviously puzzled, so he says, "Wait a minute, man, what are you saying?" Xiao Zhu explains to him that he thinks Dino's saying "China blue" in Chinese, and Dino slaps the table. "That's it, man! That's the name of our band! China Blue." So don't you believe any other stories, because this is how it happened.

Party broke up quite late, and since there was no bus back to Wan Li, Hiyoshi decided to go ahead and stay in the spare room, since he needed to be here on Sunday anyway to meet with Lisa in the afternoon. Poor baby, even with Benadryl to help he still was miserable because of his allergy to cats. At 5:00 a.m. the light in the dining room went on, waking me up because it shines right in my face, and there was Hiyoshi, at the table, working on the Chinese-to-Japanese translation he's doing for Lisa. He said he couldn't breathe while he was lying down. I gave him more Benadryl and locked DZ out on the balcony, where she stayed for the next 12 hours. Hiyoshi finally went back to sleep around 9:00 and slept until 11:00 or so. Probably be awhile before I talk him into coming back over to my house ;)