Over the last cou­ple of weeks Ange and I finally opened up the house to our fam­ily and friends. While it’s been fun, the sheer amount of work that goes into each visit means that they won’t be a reg­u­lar occur­rence. For the sake of brevity I’ll just focus on the two biggest ones.

Ange’s fam­ily would be the first to bear wit­ness to our hos­pi­tal­ity. The amount of effort that went into this puts to shame any­thing I’ve been part of in the past. Food prepa­ra­tion for this lunch began a full two days before we were to eat. It’s not really that sur­pris­ing when you think about the amount of food we were mak­ing, an antipasto plat­ter, first course, sec­ond course and dessert for six peo­ple. The first course was a lasagne so big that the meat sauce, the first thing we made, bub­bled over the edge of a wok that dwarfed the stove.
Our sec­ondi was chicken thighs stuffed with boc­concini and wrapped in bacon and cooked in the oven. Dessert was choco­late mousse tarts. If you ask Ange she’ll tell you she wasn’t happy with how they turned out, but I thought they were fine.

My side of the fam­ily (minus the younger sis­ter and her guy) made the hour long pil­gra­m­age from the home town yes­ter­day. Much like with Ange’s fam­ily, prepa­ra­tions were made well in advance. The menu was a mash up of the typ­i­cal aussie bar­beque, book­ended with italian-style entree and desserts. We started off with arancini balls. Small risotto balls with a heart of moz­zarella, deep fried until golden brown. They were fan­tas­tic. Of course I com­pletely for­got to take a pho­to­graph of them.

Main course was typ­i­cal aussie fare. Sausages, lamb chops, steak, chicken skew­ers (both ter­riyaki and lemon style) and of course Ange’s mum’s ham­burg­ers. We cooked half the meat we bought, and only half that was eaten. None of it was wasted though, as the folks were more than happy to accept doggy bags. Which I’m very grate­ful for.

I’m home sick today, so I spent most of it in front of the com­puter push­ing out the new design . As you can see I’ve imple­mented most of it, but there’s still a few more (not as crit­i­cal) things that need to be done:

• Both the Pages and Blogroll head­ings need to be fid­dled with so the images actu­ally appear. I’m using Fahrner Image Replace­ment to load all but the header and search, but the PHP (that loads the Pages and Blogroll sec­tions) doesn’t agree with FIR for some reason.
• The right-hand menu, or side­bar, needs some padding added to the left hand side so the items aren’t push­ing against the margin.
• The side­bar on the main page needs to reach to the bot­tom of the page to link up with the footer. It’s work­ing fine in the Pages sec­tion, but that’s because they’re so short.
• Lit­tle things like block­quoted text and dot points need to be reworked to fit in with the design.
• Same with the com­ments sec­tion under each entry.
• Finally, the header and search but­ton images need to be posi­tioned properly.

On top of all that I’ll be rewrit­ing both the About and Things To Do Before I Die sections.