friday morning  after weightlifting class, i was sitting at a table at the fit club pulling on my sweats over my workout pants and skimming over a paper they  had put out.  it was titled “healthy holiday party tips.”

i was scoffing at the list because it was all stuff i already knew; don’t we all know most dieting stuff ?  DON’T EAT SO DAMN MUCH, that’s really the gist of all dieting tips.

but there were specific things on this holiday party tip list, like SURVEY THE BUFFET TABLE FIRST AND DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT.

TAKE A SMALL AMOUNT OF SOMETHING YOU LIKE, AND FILL THE REST OF YOUR PLATE WITH VEGGIES.

another was FOCUS ON TALKING TO PEOPLE INSTEAD OF EATING THE HOLIDAY FOOD.

EAT SOMETHING HEALTHY BEFORE GOING TO THE PARTY.

DRINK A GLASS OF WATER IN BETWEEN DRINKS.

it went on and on, blah blah and blah, and i kept thinking, yeah yeah yeah, i’m not going to GO CRAZY at the holiday party on saturday night, i’m not going to just eat and eat and drink and drink, i will be good, i will behave…

this was Morning Grace doing all the talking to myself, of course.

saturday i was busy baking more and more cookies and instead of lunch i ate two cookies solely for the purpose of quality-checking them, and so by the time i started getting ready to go to the party I WAS STARVING.

no time to eat a healthy snack, and who really wants a damn healthy snack before going to a party anyway?

the party was at gil and ann’s house and they live very very far away from us, about a half hour, so by the time we got there i was COMPLETELY STARVING.

i didn’t actually pull a chair up to the buffet table but ONLY BECAUSE I COULDN’T FIND A CHAIR.

instead, i circled around and around, piling on the food, eating the food, piling on more, around and around.  there was a large variety of tasty delights including a bunch of stuff from wisconsin, where they vacation every year, among other places.  piles of smoked wisconsin fish, wisconsin braunschweiger, wisconsin cheese, circling, circling, circling the table…

i knew some of the people at the party and chatted with them WHILE STILL CIRCLING THE TABLE, and then i lost my glass of wine.  i spotted it on the sideboard, polished off the contents and refilled it…but then after a while randy was looking for his wine glass and kept saying “it has three kings on it,” and i realized that all the glasses were painted with various christmas themes; i hadn’t noticed when i first got my glass cause i was just so eager to fill it up.

and lo and behold, MY glass had three kings on it, and hmm, randy had left his glass right where i’d picked mine up…

i told him i had his glass and he said BUT MINE HAD WINE IN IT.  i said yeah, i drank it.

and continued to circle the table.

he seemed kind of horrified that i’d stolen his glass but come on, it’s a party, every man for himself!  what’d you set it down for?  ann seemed to give randy a hard time about me stealing his glass which i didn’t quite understand but didn’t really care so much about because i had food to eat and wine to drink.

i did eat a piece of broccoli.  i really don’t like raw broccoli but i know it’s very very good for you, so i did feel pretty virtuous taking the lone broccoli piece.

i didn’t drink any water because i didn’t see the cooler full of water til we were leaving, but i did take a bottle to go.

i suppose i could have gotten water out of the kitchen tap but there always seemed to be wine in my glass, and since i had glass in one hand and plate in the other, i had no room for yet another glass.

oh yeah, and i didn’t try ALL the desserts, just gil’s famous delicious cakes baked in fancy decorative pans.  thgree kinds – butterscotch, chocolate mint, and some other moist delicious kind served with a side of cake gravy.

no, of course it’s not actually GRAVY, it’s some delicious glaze thing that you pour over the cake just like…gravy.  randy coined the term cake gravy.

gil went to so much trouble, eating a slice of each kind of cake  seemed like the least i could do.

before we left, gil showed us the gorgeous bedspread they’d gotten on their recent trip to india.  yeah, wisconsin, india, the opfermans really get around.

here is the bedspread.  my cell phone picture doesn’t do it justice; it’s a vivid royal blue, and gil said some old guy made it.   it must have taken him a very long time.

and now it’s monday morning already, virtuous morning grace is about to head off to work out yet again, then massages to give, presents to wrap, and more damn cookies to bake…

but the end is near.

the end of the world too, right?  isn’t 2012 the big year, wasn’t there a movie about that already?

clearly, if that’s the case, all the party eating was absolutely the right thing to do.

ok then,

mrs. monday morning hughes.