Spent most of yesterday at a party, from 2 pm to around 1 am when I green_trilobite and handful_ofdust got into a taxi. Lots of good conversation with people, including a tax accountant, Sunny, who's really interesting -- she apparently plays the ukelele (sadly, she did not bring it to the party), knows the founder of Knitty.com through the ukelele community, and also very much enjoys handful_ofdust's Oz slashfic. I think we convinced her to read the rest of the Hexslinger trilogy (she likes Chess and Rook so much she can't bear to see something bad happen to them). We talked about Sherlock Holmes with Dave, who has just begun reading the originals. He also mentioned that he'd love to see a James Bond movie that is a faithful adaptation of one of Fleming's original stories, set in the post-war period, and which demonstrates what always struck him about the originals, which is that the luxuries Bond manages to enjoy during the course of his missions are usually very simple ones -- thing like real eggs, not powdered, cooked the way he likes them. He lives under rationing when he's in England, after all.

Green_trilobite snagged a chair upon arrival and seems to have enjoyed holding forth on whatever subjects came up, with whomever came by. towards the end of the evening he was showing his trilobite photos to a poet with a day job at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Our hostess made ice cream; it was indeed very creamy. I had made a (not large enough) Eton mess, after reading about the dish a few weeks back; given that the ice cream recipe calls for egg yolks, and the Eton mess includes meringue, I think next time we should coordinate our efforts in order to use both parts of the eggs.

(Edited to correct the spelling of Sunny's name)

green_trilobite's birthday went pretty well. Not everyone could make it, but those who did appeared to enjoy themselves. I wore my cocktail-size fez. I think I stocked just about the right amount of food, but definitely more than enough alcohol; I suppose the leftovers will be consumed eventually. Note to self - next time have more glasses that aren't martini glasses; they don't hold that much, and at least one guest found them disorienting to hold (he's blind in one eye, and they were the kind with a curved stem).