Where Ocean is promoting a great way to have people over, serve food and drinks and spend no time preparing for any of it.

Simply call it a happy hour. It’s a new thing, started by a small group of people in my neighborhood (first banded together over pre-election debates). We want you to come over, at the end of the week, after work and we’ll make some martinis. So said the email invite some months back. Since then it’s become an institution.

Last night it was at my house. Some dozen people, squeezed around the kitchen table (since it’s not a meal, you don’t have to worry about the fact that a dozen people do not really fit around your kitchen table), eating whatever snacks I could throw together in the half hour that I had before they came (no excuses needed when I shamelessly take off the lid from prepared Whole Foods salads, or slice up a loaf of bread and throw it next to a St Nectaire cheese, or dump precooked on-sale shrimp with store-bought dipping sauce).

Oh, the stories that are told when it’s tight like that and you have to stand up to recount what happened when Laura Bush came to the hospital and mistook you for one of the mentally-challenged patients (you can really build that one after a round of martinis, bringing tears to people’s faces).

All you need is a kitchen table. Even without a meal on it, it is the draw. Happy hour becomes happy many hours.

To those who were here last night: thank you for the anticipatory cake and good wishes! You totally flooded me with your good hearts.

To readers who have yet to be told repeatedly by me that somewhere in the week ahead I am flipping a digit – sort of like springing forward with the clock, except there is no reversal come next season – yes, my birthday is coming* and yes, I take it very very seriously. Simply put: I love this pseudo-reflective and hopeful day of the year where every mistake can be erased and life can start all over, on a better track.

* John Muir, Queen Elizabeth and me. It used to be Hitler too, but recently, historians peg him as being born the day before my day. Thank God. I hated sharing any space with Adolph even if he may have been an okay-looking baby.