Dishes

Something that has bothered me the last few times we've had dinner parties is not having enough dishes to serve our guests with. Twice we've run out of plates and had to improvise. I decided after Christmas that I wanted to start looking for a replacement set from our current dishes, that come from GB's single life, and, although nice, are not quite as sophisticated as I would like. I've been looking for something that's nice enough for dinner parties but durable enough to use everyday, oh, and not ridiculously expensive. I've had a lot of fun these past few weeks surfing many dinnerware web sites.

I was finally able to drag GB out to William Ashley, who are having an amazing sale right now (with a warning of course that his patience would be limited - I think he'd rather have a root canal than go shopping - I, on the other hand could spend hours in that store just browsing!).

During our 1.5 hour endeavor (which far surpassed GB's new measure of shopping patience - the time it took for our coffees that we had to leave at the door to get cold), we managed to talk our selves into considering a ridiculously expensive set of formal dinnerware on top of the casual set we also planned to purchase. Luckily, we had the sensibility to "take some time to think about it", and when walking out the door we passed a quite nice set that was, I kid you not - one eighth the price! Granted, it wasn't quite as nice as the other set, but to GB's point, we'd like to have dishes that we would feel sick if someone accidentally broke one.

So, we were able to bring our casual set, Pfaltzgraff Sphere in green, home with us today, while our formal set (Mikasa Cameo Platinum) is on order. After unpacking, washing, and rearranging the cupboards (what fun!), taking a good look at our dishes, I'm tempted to say, they are actually good enough for entertaining, and maybe we should forgo the formal set altogether. I'll need to think on it, but we do have a few weeks. It just seems silly to have an extra set of dishes that you bring out only once or twice a year. We'll see...