*democratic party.

I have some serious choices to make. I hope dear L Sis doesn't take it personally, but things must change. Either we must stop hanging out so often, or she needs to develop a fictional life so that her blog posts do not interfere with mine. And because she's just so darn entertaining, I suggest she develop a hysterical pregnancy or pick up a pretend narcotic habit. Or craft a side business doing bizarre things to pets.



Not that that's going to stop me from posting identical pictures from Tuesday night, mind you. At any rate, she's moved on to reporting on workplace hate speech, so I think I'm in the clear.

The evening had a rather inauspicious start. Number of finger foods prepared: 0. Number of trips to the grocery store to assemble the FIVE ingredients needed: 2. Number of full containers of food dashed to the ground, causing major spillage: 2. Number of clumsy elbows dunked in chocolate: 1. Number of expletives hurled into the dark night: countless.

It's official—I cannot hurry. When I hurry, I do things like discover I have an inability to differentiate the 1/4 cup measure from the 1/3 cup measure. Bonus: No one died from accidental brown sugar overdose. I brought a grammatical nightmare, Smoked Salmon with Avocado and Wasabi Cream Cheese Finger Sanwiches.



Meh. There were some raves, but also a lot of leftovers. In part because there was so much good food to be had (A, I want that chili recipe YESTERDAY) and I arrived fashionably (read: 90 minutes) late. In my defense, it's time-consuming to clean oats off your floor when you don't own a dustpan. But mostly I blame the organic avocados. Publix was fresh out of the regular variety, shiny with pesticides and shot full of hormones. These weren't pristine and spearmint-color on the inside, and despite the lemon juice's best efforts, they went gray-brown fast. The salmon was just angry-making, laced as it was with artificial color that wouldn't even fool a blind person. Only the cream cheese and wasabi salvaged the misspelled little bastards, so this one goes firmly on the not-making-again list.

I did redeem myself with Pumpkin Muffins, tossing out the hateful nuts and raisins to make room for lovely, melty chocolate chips.



I could have gone for something denser and more pumpkiny, but they were still delicious. Possibly helped by the fact that I've been craving them for weeks. The pumpkins natural orangeness makes it a cinch to keep from overmixing the batter—you know you're done when everything is orange, and that process doesn't take very long. I think JLB snuck them over to her neighbor's plate in a reinterpretation of the Brussels-sprouts-in-the-napkin charade, but I'm pretty sure SisInLaw snuck two in her purse, so it all evened out.

Verdict: Tasty, but completely steamrolled in the cleverness department.



Touché, SisInLaw. I am outmatched.

I can't describe the energy at 11 Bonita that night. There was blue-state Jell-O, spiked with raspberry vodka and served in plastic cups on a silver tray (for the elitists).



TFin was a blur of boundless excitement.



With every state won, we allowed ourselves to unroll the optimism, bit by bit. When the threshold passed and the magnum came out,



we jumped around and we screamed and we lost it. We laughed through our tears and hugged each other until we thought we'd break. And we forgot that our jobs are tenuous and our bills are mounting and our friends in California lost their grip on humanity.

And we made a toast.



Because these times, they are a-changing.