Another long weekend done...

So we had another long weekend. It was a good one, though we didn't get much rest. Saturday was spent driving around getting errands done, including grocery shopping and stereo shopping for our car. We're planning on driving to Halifax next week, and we were hoping to get our PhatNoise(tm) system installed in the car before we go. But we need two different cables (unfortunately VW cables don't work with the Audi decks), and a stereo shop to install the whole thing. It's a lot of hassle, and a fair amount of money too, but hopefully we only need to do it this once and we'll keep it like that for the next 10 years. I really hope so. We're so used to this system from the time we had a Passat, it is very user friendly and invaluable for long car trips. I think we have something like 5 days worth of music stored in the cartridge :) Makes it a lot easier to drive around, especially on those long hauls. We may try to get to Halifax straight from Montreal, which is a pretty long drive, so hopefully it will help us stay awake (if we get everything installed in time). We've been procrastinating on this because it is so expensive and complicated. In the Passat we were able to do the install ourselves, so that was a lot simpler...

On Sunday, we spent the day cleaning and cooking (and cleaning again), because we had some company over for dinner. It was really nice. There were 8 adults and 1 kid (my friend princess D). We only have 6 matching chairs, so some people had to sit on mismatched furniture, but aside from that I think the evening was a success. There was enough food to feed everyone, I remembered to serve the salad at the last minute, and the tart peach/apple pie I baked went very well with the *sweet* soy ice cream that I had bought. One of our friends is vegan, so I made the whole meal vegan (no meat, no dairy products, no eggs, you get the picture). It's challenging at times to come up with a menu that's vegan, and I hate to always serve the good old reliable "pasta with tomato sauce", so this time I made a vegan meatloaf :) I basically used the TVP (textured vegetable protein) instead of ground beef in my favourite meatloaf recipe, I omitted the eggs all together and added a bit of olive oil to moisten and flavour the whole thing. It must have turned out alright, since there were no leftovers :) I served the TVP-loaf with young potatoes, cauliflower and broccoli, and a tabouleh-type salad. I also made a leek and potato soup, and the aforementioned pie for dessert :)

One of the guys brought a friend with him, which is quite unusual. You see, this bunch is basically 5 guys who have known each other since pretty much kindergarden (DH's childhood friends), 2 spouses and 1 kid. We get together fairly regularly, but it's pretty much always the same lineup ;) So it was nice to have someone new join us, with new conversation and a fresh perspective. Most of us already know her from work, so it all felt very comfortable. Of course it helps that she's very nice and easy to get along with :) And we're also happy for our friend, who's had some bad luck with women in the past. To summarize, we had a very nice evening on Sunday.

On Monday we went out for brunch with DH's dad and aunt (FIL has been staying with her over the last few days). Again, a good time was had by all. I really like aunt E, she always has great stories to tell us, and she wanted to hear all about our China trip. So we shared trip stories and anecdotes until early afternoon, at which point we went back to work to do some more cleanup. We've started working on the computer room, and believe it or not, we can now actually see the floor :) There's still mountains of papers on the desk and all horizontal surfaces ;) but I have hope that we can get through the whole thing at some point... Maybe even before Christmas :D It's definitely a good activity to do when the weather is so dreary... It rained pretty much all weekend - thanks Ernesto!

Big hugs to everyone!