I'm back and I'm exhausted

We finally have internet again. Of course we have gone from a high-speed (well, high-speed by Georgian standards) wireless set-up to a DSL line that is almost like having dial-up service again. Ah, technology. But at least we can connect, get email, touch base with friends and, most importantly for me, shop Amazon.com for books.

We almost were not able to get back on-line. For 3 days the internet company kept coming out and "working" on our DSL and could not get it to connect. They even (or so they claim) went to the phone switch here in town and checked our phone lines. After 3 days of this jockeying around they told me that "tomorrow" they would have someone from the phone company come out and test our lines in the house and run a test line for the DSL. I told David about this when he got home from work and Dave decided to try to tackle the DSL problem himself. Dave is an expert (in my not-so-humble opinion) on all things computer and networking. Heck, this is what he used to do for a living for almost 10 years so he should be, right? Well, once again he proved himself smarter than the average bear and managed to get our DSL line to connect after only 10 minutes of fiddling around with it. What 2 Georgian technicians couldn't do in 3 days, my husband did in 10 minutes. Now you see why I keep him around (aside from the great father, loving husband, resident scary bug killer and car fixer gig that he is so good at).

As for the exhaustion part. Well, aside from the fact that I'm almost 4 months pregnant and am constantly chasing the world's most stubborn 3 year old, we had a bar-b-que yesterday for a new family in town. It was our first big party since arriving in Tbilisi and David was pretty positive that we would have a small showing. Ha. Ha. Luckily I planned otherwise. All day Saturday I cooked, baked, and otherwise prepared. By the time the party rolled around I was ready. 10 pounds of potato salad, a huge bowl of cole slaw, baked beans, apple crisp, brownies, bruschetta, 20 hamburgers, 20 hot dogs, 30+ chicken and beef shish kebobs with peppers, onions, and garlic, 50 chicken wings (spicy hot, naturally), chips, dips, vegetable trays, green salad, cheese trays, 3 cases of beer, a few bottles of wine, more juice boxes and bottles of water than my refrigerator could hold.

Over 50 people showed up. We ran out of hot dogs, hamburgers, water and paper plates. I have no idea how the paper plate thing happened as I had a costco-sized stack of about 200 plates, but now I know to plan better next time. Running out of bottled water was unexpected - I thought we had more than enough, but it was a real scorcher of a day so people drank twice as much water as beer, much to my consternation. Now I have refrigerator full of beer plus a cooler still full. I can't drink, Dave rarely drinks and I don't know what the hell I'm going to do with all this beer. Ha. Maybe I'll have another party. I still have about a pound or two of potato salad left. Hey everyone, I have beer and potato salad, come on over!