The house smells like Italy

And well it should, with home made tomato sauce on the stove, along with Italian sausage and garlic bread.

After the discovery of the shameful amounts of tomato products and pasta in the Great Pantry Inventory and Rearrangement of April '14, I put a message up on Facebook asking if anyone local wanted to come over for an Italian dinner.

Two moms, each with three little girls, said sure! we'd love to come! Unfortunately, one mom has a coworker who had a family emergency, and she is helping out by taking care of the coworker's kids for the next couple of days. So we are down to just five of us.

Spaghetti with the home made sauce, Italian sausage pan fried then cooked for a while in the sauce, garlic bread and a big old salad are on the main menu. Peapod had their adorable (and very tasty) mini red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting on sale, so I added them to the order I got yesterday. Dessert is set.

The idea is to put on a Disney movie for the girls, and hope that mom and I get a chance to chat. With Amazon Prime, Netflix and a Roku, I should be able to conjure up just bout any movie the girls (and their mom) will approve of.

A nice ending to the week of vacation (I don't really count the final weekend as "vacation", as it's pretty much a regular weekend, what with getting clothes clean for work and making lunches, though I will still do fun stuff). Sometime later this week I'll put up pictures of some quilty things that got made. Car repairs were handled, lots of reading was done, some cleaning, some patio planning, but not doing (stupid weather, only warm and dry a couple days, and I already had other plans for those times) and a bunch of other stuff.

I do feel relaxed, but not resigned to going back to work. Until the credit card bill hits, that is.

Better finish up the last minute stuff. The salad needs assembling, and the pasta water run and preheated. It takes forever for a big pot of water to boil on the electric stove; I find that if I prewarm the water, I can get it to boiling much more quickly when the guests arrive.