Happy Birthday Jenny!

Michael and I had a night away a few weekends ago. It was Jenny's 70th birthday and she'd planned a 'little do' in town. We arranged for our professional house sitter, Liz, (17) to look after the girls, dogs, cat and chooks and we booked a room at a motel in town.

Even though I know Jenny is not your normal 70 year old, I still half expected the night to be .... tame. I knew that the 'cream of Hamilton society' had been invited, as well as friends from all over the state. I wasn't expecting the raging night we had.

We started off with nibbles and drinks in the bar area - all 90 of us. Jenny had made most of the nibblies herself and asked me to assist in taking the trays around. There were the usual sausage rolls, toast and pate, seafood bites, mini salmon quiches, arancini balls.... and plenty of them. I think most people were almost full before they'd even gotten to the dinner part of the evening.

We then had dinner - alternate fish pies and beef braised in guiness pies, served with mashed potato and peas. Jenny made all of it (she was the chef at the Stirring Pot restaurant for a few years!). I'm not a big fish fan, but the fish pie was delicious! Dessert was fruit stewed in brandy, with icecream, followed by platters of cheese and biscuits, fresh from the Queen Vic Markets, and platters of hand made chocolates to accompany the coffee/tea.

Wine flowed freely that night. Michael counted that our table (of 8) went through at least 10 bottles. Before dinner was even served, I had a bottle of red knocked over almost on top of me. And it wasn't even me that did it, it was Jenny's son-in-law! Before anybody was even pissed! I only got a bit on my sleeves and pants, so it wasn't too bad - though I did reek of eau de Cab Sauv all night.

Jenny is an Elvis fan, so she had an Elvis impersonator singing songs and entertaining us. It was hilarious watching him kissing up to all the older ladies, the supposed prim and proper matrons. Like hell they are!

Jenny's grandchildren got up on the stage to give a speech about there Nan. I loved the story from one of the grandsons, now about 21. He said that when most people talk about grandmothers, they have the image of the knitting, tea sipping little old ladies. When he tells people about his Nan, he tells this story which epitomises the character of Jenny. "She went to a kitchen store in Melbourne and bought a $60 pepper grinder. When I asked her why she spent so much money on a pepper grinder, she said "Because it's fuckin' classy, asshole"." Yep, that's Jenny!

After copious amounts of wine had been consumed, dinner had been eaten and Elvis had exhausted his repertoire, a few of us (included Jenny's slightly uninhibited daughter) got up on the dance floor and shook our groove thing. The others just retired into the bar and kept drinking. We finally got kicked out at 1.30am, so they could lock up the club.

It was a fantastic night!

The next morning, we were invited to Jenny's for breakfast. I had thought it was just going to be a small select group of family and close friends... and it was, about 60 of us! I'd been supplying Jenny with eggs for weeks previously and I'd wondered if I'd been oversupplying her. Nope, she was also getting eggs from another source and had over 14 dozen. John, her son that owns and chefs at his Melbourne restaurant, stood in front of the stove poaching eggs for most of the morning. There was a large bowl of fruit salad, poached eggs, bacon, toasted homemade bread, tomatoes. A barista friend brought along his coffee machine and was doing coffees with the loveheart or ferns in the milk trick. The first bottle of champagne was opened about 9.30am.

Jenny mentioned that she had gone to bed about 4am. She'd invited her family in for a nightcap, so they finished off another three bottles of wine..... and then she saw the scotch and thought that looked like a good idea. Yet she was up bright and chirpy (and still probably pissed) with no sign of a hangover, whilst her fellow nightcappers looked like death warmed up.

It was a wonderful weekend, only marred by the fact that Jess greeted us on arrival home with her tail between her legs. It seems that whilst the girls were occupied inside the house with painting their nails and playing the Wii, the flying chook (the one that laid the enormous eggs) flew out of the protection of the pen and was 'plucked' by the dogs. So we are down to five chooks and none of them have shown an interest in flying...... yet.