Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive.

Wow, the big dinner turned out to be a pretty painless affair. It was for D's parents. The whole thing was mostly his brother's idea, and all their friends were invited, which was what kind of brought me dread.



The parents have two major couples for friends, let's call them the Peacocks and the Mustards. The Mustards are cool and mellow and Mrs. Mustard especially is neat. The Peacocks, or rather, just Mrs. Peacock, is a fairly intolerant fuck. Angelic facade, but judgmental as hell. She's ok in small doses but does seem to be altogether oblivious to the world and anyone other than herself.

However, they have a son and daughter who are very cool. The daughter married D's brother, so technically she's my sister-in-law. She is definitely conservative but she couldn't be nicer. The brother, whom I just met last night, is really cool. I have heard lots of interesting, rebellious stories from D about this guy whom we'll call Todd. There was even a story involving "road beers" at an otherwise stuffy wedding party. But Todd has evened out, mostly finished rebelling against the oppressive mother and is now quite normal.

He also brought his live-in girlfriend (apparently Mrs. Peacock originally had more than a few choice words for Todd about how she should refer to this woman, "Your wife? Your live-in lover?" and was pretty snotty about the whole thing). But I really like the girlfriend. Very neat lady, good interests. She's a local reporter but I can't say I'm too embarrassed I don't watch local news. I should probably give her station a peek now and again. At least we live in a big city, they don't all have to run for the cat-rescue stories.

So there were two tables and as you might imagine, we sat at the cool table. I'm sure the other table was fine, but we had wine at our table. I mean, at one point someone said, "Did you realize Aaron Sorkin wrote Charlie Wilson's War?" and it wasn't me. Though I did probably talk too much.

Most importantly, the parents were surprised by the big event and our duties of getting flowers and cake all went very well. Everyone was in love with the cake, asking where we'd gotten it or who made it, and we had to mutter, "Albertsons." (We had two days notice!)

So I really lucked out last night; I kept telling D how surprising it was for Mrs. Peacock to have such neat kids, but I guess that's how it works sometimes...