Morgan seems to be at that age when she's growing and changing so fast, she is noticeably different each time I see her. I have known her literally since the day she was born, and yet, somehow, when she finally arrived with Danielle and two of her teenage friends yesterday, I nearly didn't recognize her. The face I was so used to had visibly changed. Not in anything close to a bad way, just . . . shockingly grown-up looking.

We had a semi-surreal moment yesterday, indicating the scale of time passing, after Morgan said she "has a job." She actually just looks after a neighbor's dog, but the guy works nights and has Morgan go over "in the middle of the night" (I don't know what time that means, exactly) to feed. He pays her $100 a month for this.

Jordan, Morgan's older sister on her dad's side from a previous marriage who I haven't seen in ages (I checked my tags on Facebook: last photos I took of her were in 2009), said, "A hundred bucks is nothing anymore." Well, I wouldn't say that.

But, I decided to look up an inflation calculator to see how much $100 to Morgan would have been to Danielle and me the year she and I turned 14 -- 1990. To my astonishment, it was barely more than half: $53.27. That said, fifty bucks was a lot to me at the age of fourteen. It's taken 28 years for inflation to nearly halve the value of our dollars. Here's the other shocking part: 1990 was a lot longer ago than I realized. Obviously a lot of change can take place in three decades.

One of the two friends Morgan brought, whose name I forget, has known her since they were both four years old, in preschool. I thought that was pretty cool, as it means they have already known each other ten years. And if they are still frends in their forties, as Danielle and I are, then they will have Danielle and me well beat: Danielle and I did not meet each other until we were 11. 1987. Thirty-one years ago next month.

Anyway, I suppose it's not much of a surprise that the three teenage girls did not eat a huge amount of the massive volume of food Shobhit made. To be fair, Danielle had put me under the impression that we may have up to three adults along with these kids, rather than just one: the mother of one of Morgan's friends, and the lady who did henna for the kids before they drove up to our place in Seattle. This was the same lady who was hired for Shobhit's and my henna party before our wedding in 2013, but she was about to leave for a weekend with an RV and couldn't make it. The other mom didn't come either. Also, Rylee, Morgan's little sister, took the opportunity to play with some friends of her own instead of coming to dinner. So, including Shobhit and me, we had dinner for seven, rather than nine. (Rylee being one less kid's mouth to feed was replaced by one more mouth to feed in the form of an extra friend of Morgan's, when I thought she was bringing only one.)

Danielle apologized for not managing to keep us in the loop more, but it was stil fine. Having too much food prepared is Shobhit's M.O., and it's not like any of it will go to waste. I did text Danielle to remind her to bring containers, but she still forgot; we had four yogurt containers to give her anyway.

She also brought a "unicorn rainbow cake" a friend of hers had made. I really thought when she told me she'd be bringing that, that she would be buying it from a store somewhere. Nope, it was homemade -- a bit unnaturally tall since it was made of six thin-ish layers of cake, each treated with food coloring the color of the rainbow. The frosting design work was beautiful and also tasty. The cake itself was a little dry, but worked well with one of the six flavors of ice cream we had to choose from in our freezer (all 48oz tubs on sale via digital coupons for 99 cents at QFC -- the reason I urged Danielle not to bring any ice cream). The cake was so rich and voluminous that not a whole lot of the ice cream even got consumed. Maybe I'll have some for dessert tonight instead of a drink.

Anyway. You can click here for the photo set in full on Flickr, where plenty more detail of the evening can be found in the captions.

Before all that, I left work just a little before 12:30 yesterday afternoon, and as soon as I got home, I vacuumed the condo. Shobhit got home early from work soon after. We then commenced to deep frying the samosas: Shobhit would roll out the dough; fold them in a particular way to make them triangular with a skill I could never master; fill them with potatoes; and then drop them in vegetable oil in a wok. I was on fry duty, basically; I turned them over and scooped them out with a slitted utensil once they were done. We made 24 of them; 4 were still leftover at the end of the evening. They were truly spectacular samosas -- as per usual.

There was a brief period there where I wondered if we really had needed to come home from work as early as we did -- and, indeed, we had. Next was deep frying the kachoris, with basically the same process, except this time they were flat breads Shobhit filled with a lentil filling. Those, we made forty of, and by the time we finally finished, we had less than an hour before Danielle was expected (although she arrived about half an hour after that). This gave us time to prepare the rice, and also reheat all the other dishes that had been prepared over the previous two days. Then they were all set out on the table.

Shobhit was a little surprised at how little the kids ate, and Morgan wouldn't even try the okra. Shobhit tried to pressure her into it, but I put a stop to that -- it was her birthday, she could eat whatever the fuck she wanted. Danielle told him later what she was really looking forward to was the samosas. And those, indeed, did get mostly devoured.

So that was how Shobhit and I spent the afternoon yesterday. Today we spent the late morning and early afternoon at a movie: Mission: Impossible - Fallout, which we saw at 11 a.m. at Pacific Place downtown. The movie is 147 minutes long, by some distance the longest in the franchise, and after at least 20 minutes of trailers, it was about a quarter till 2:00 by the time it let out.

We walked to Pike Place after that, as Shobhit likes to do, and wound up at the wine store where he bought six bottles of wine. A brief visit at Victor Steinbrueck Park, and then we walked back to Westlake Station to catch Light Rail to Capitol Hill Station and then walk our bags of wine bottles back home.

I wrote my movie review. And then captioned the photos from last night. And then wrote this post.

[posted 5:43 pm]