"Okay, I'm definitely not living in Kansas."

Hmm, how typical, I've been in my apartment less than a week and already hosted my first social gathering. I invited three gals over to my place for sangrias and girls night, and it really was a blast! I know all three from different routes - old friend from undergrad, girlfriend of another friend, and the old highschool friend of one of my college housemates. But it turns out that all of them are in the same department in the Hum Ec school! They're all sort of doing different things; El is getting her masters in Fiber Science, Janine her masters in Apparel and Fashion Design, and Patti is working full time with one of the profs in the biomaterials lab. So although they had met each other they didn't really know each other.

I invited everyone over at 7, and expected that people would leave between 9 and 10 depending on how things went. Instead the party didn't break up until a quarter of midnight!! I had a new audience for expounding on cultural differences between the midwest and the northeast. :-D Janine is a Utica NY girl, so there was lots to fill her in on. ;-) I mean I didn't do it intentionally, but you know me, the conversation often goes there when I have the chance! And Patti, being from western Kansas, has far more extreme stories to tell than I do! She had us laughing pretty hard with her stories of rattlesnake bites (that sounds like a scary topic but actually it was funny) and mountain lions and coyotes and tarantulas and bull constrictors. After which Janine was like "Mountain lions? Okay, you just sealed the deal. Absolutely no way am I ever going to Kansas."

Of course in the beginning Patti and I managed to get on a joint soapbox about the Cornell ag professor who wrote that ethanol paper, and what a load of bunk it was. I eventually had to pull us back, because we were definitely feeding off each other. It's kind of fun to have another midwest farm gal around though! And Janine and El, both having a fashion history background, had their little time later in the evening when they really got going about the Met and it's fashion exhibits like Dangerous Liasons and the Chanel exhibit.

All in all it was a fun night - and actually it didn't really take that much cleaning up after!

It's a little early to tell, but I think the group may actually fit my sustainable quartet theory. See, it seems that in my life there have been a number of times when I've been part of a quartet of friends. The quartets form unintentionally, simply because a certain group of people have a mix of traits that taken in pairs don't necessarily form as strong of a bond, but which in the group of four really melds well. For instance, the quartet I'm thinking of in highschool: 3/4 of us were in band, 3/4 of us in choir, 3/4 of us religious, 3/4 of us super interested in dating, 3/4 of us in the top 10% of the class, and so on. The end result is a group who is close as a group out of common interests or persuasions, with subdivisions sometimes on personalities (we had two outgoing and debative and two noncombative, also two more worldy and two less worldy). And usually it seems like there are two people who maybe wouldn't be friends on their own, but who are sort of brought together by the other two and consequently become friends.