The 50% Rule.

I'm not sure if anyone else has noticed this but it's one of those oddball details that jumps out at me. Whenever we have a party we have to invite twice as many people as we actually feel like entertaining.

We have known this for some time now but we get complacent and cocky every now and then. And then you have the whole bubble group thing to think about. Here's how it works.

Let's say we want to have a party with twenty people attending. I keep a list of three or four hundred of my closest friends in my computer. So my wife and I will start going down the list to see who would be a good mix of people and personalities. (I mean, we can't have all duck wranglers because they like to turn the heat off in the hot tub and float lilly pads.) But experience has told us that on any given day, kids, cars and dead relatives will chew into the party list, so if we want that twenty, we have to invite forty.

The real trick is to try to guess which half will actually make it. This is because my wife asks people to bring some kind of food. You know, like cheese and crackers or champagne and caviar. (The cheese and crackers people usually show up more often.) So if we do it wrong we could end up with a bunch of constipated duck wranglers. Not a pretty sight at a nudist resort.

And, as it is with so many other things, just the opposite is true. For small group parties, everyone shows up. How many times did we decide to have steaks on the deck for six people (including us) and I'm suddenly cooking for ten. Where do you even get delmonico helper? So the conversation usually sounds like, "Mmmm, this is really good steak! How's your hot dog?"

Once we finally realized that Murphy was fucking with us, we began over-inviting for the big parties and under-inviting for the smaller ones. And it all worked out. This, of course , is where the complacent cockiness comes in play. As well as the bubble group.

Every time you think you have finally figured out how life works, the tiki gremlins stick you in the ankle with one of their little knives. We religiously follow the 50% rule for big parties and we always keep four extra steaks on hand for the smaller ones. But the bubble group are right in between. I estimate that ten guests is right on the bubble between the two groups. Just small enough for everyone to show up, yet large enough that the champagne and caviar guy's mother's cat could be having car trouble again.

The only reason I am mentioning any of this is that I spent last night in the emergency room having cheese scraped out of my colon, again. And, today, I have to fix the heater in my new duck pond.