An Unexpected Invitation Leads To A Lovely Evening

So two weeks, or so, ago, I was invited to a solstice party by a reader. This was, of course, very cool to me. Very cool because this dude reads my blog regularly and found the blog interesting enough to invite me to a shin-dig he was throwing. I have a pretty good concept of who the people I know in the real world read the blog. But I have less of an idea of who reads the blog for the blog's sake and not out of knowing me. And so this invitation definitely functions as encouragement that the blog can, potentially, appeal to people who don't know me. This invitation was also encouraging because I was permitted to invite a few friends. And since I get super scared of new situations if I don't have a few familiar faces, this was the perfect addendum to an already exciting prospect. Alls to say that the boyfriend, mousehead, exploded viewer and I went to this solstice party and had a very lovely time.
Our host works in the wine world and had many wines on offer. I found myself sticking to champagne because, well, I love champagne. And this champagne, Roederer Estate, was quite bubbalicious. Though I also tried the Goose Island XXX Porter which was surprisingly tasty to a non-dark/porter beer lover (the boyfriend didn't like it because it tasted too much like coffee for him). Their spread was enviable and I wish I hadn't been so flustered...the photographs could be better.

This is one of their dogs, she was way busy trying to get people to give her tidbits from the food table to stay still for a photograph.
There was also a wine game that involved four unmarked carafes (bottles?) of Syrahs (the boyfriend would phrase it: wines based on the syrah grape). The game was to guess, as close as possible, the geographical location of the wine. The boyfriend and mousehead/exploded viewer played the game. I started, but got impatient with my lack of wine knowledge...though I do think the first wine was from California. This game lead us to think about a similar game we could play where the goal would be to figure out which wine was the $2.99, the $6.99, etc. Fun!
We also talked to a prosecutor/law guy who had an interesting and first hand perspective on the war against drugs.

Thanks again to our host and hostess and canine hostesses as well. It was lovely and we were all glad to meet y'all.

An addendum: It seems that the boyfriend (and I, though he did all the guessing...I was wrong about the first one being from California) won the wine game! He got 2.75 points out of a possible 6.25. The prize? A bottle of the wines that made up the game. Very cool.