HO HO HO

I'm having a Christmas party tonight, which means that any minute now I have to leap into action and start cleaning my house (my to-do list includes sweeping up the dirt under the kitchen table from the plant the cats knocked over sometime during the early hours of Wednesday morning, and mopping up the cooking oil they spilled last night -- no, they weren't cooking, at least, I don't think they were cooking. I was cooking -- stove-top microwave popcorn, one of my specialties. Apparently I left the lid off the cooking oil bottle and the cats did the rest.)

Last night a friend and I took our annual stroll through the Christmas market in Old Town Square, drinking mulled wine, pricing ceramic beer mug/can of Krusovice gift packs, listening to the ethereal voice of the boy onstage (or "the eunuch" as we preferred to think of him), wondering if it was worth climbing up on the wooden platform in the center to view the whole magical scene from a vantage point roughly 10 feet off the ground -- deciding it wasn't. We had just concluded, for the second year in a row, that "nothing says Christmas like being ankle-deep in Japanese tourists," when we received a phone call from yet another friend who informed us we were "retarded" that the whole Old Town Square scene was "icky" and that we had better join her in a smoky bar instead.

So we did.

We sat for three hours in a room so full of cigarette smoke I felt like I'd been cured -- in the bacon sense, not the healed sense. Beer was drunk, politics discussed, fusball ensued. I got home sometime around midnight and whipped up that stove-top microwave popcorn I mentioned earlier.

The party is predicated on my roommate's acquisition of 100 bottles of beer from a Sikh friend who bought a beer gallery and is turning it into an internet cafe. He gave us a good deal on the beer (which I haven't actually seen yet, but which I'm told will be arriving sometime this afternoon) but the idea of having 100 bottles of beer in our house scared us both, so we decided to have a party and share the wealth.

The guest list apparently includes "some Hungarian guy, a guy from Madrid, and that weird guy," so it should be quite a time.

Okay, I suppose I should start cleaning...