One of the most fun things we do Downtown is nail one of our friends with a surprise birthday party. This weekend we totally got our friend Shawn. We had a get-together at the Flying Saucer Friday night, which Shawn thought was his birthday party. Here are a few pics of that.
Shawn smiles as bartender Katie announces a toast for his birthday
Lauren and Chad, with Stephanie unsuccessfully trying to lean far enough back to get out of the pic. What’s up with the ’80s one-shoulder top Steph?
Lights out! No, this isn’t a bad pic. The Saucer went totally dark for about 7 or 8 minutes. I found out the next day that some kids were arrested for messing with a fuse box at the Peabody. They must have hit the Saucer too.
Now let’s move on to Saturday, the REAL party. Shawn had some friends in town, and the Nuh-Uh Girl invited them over to her place in Number 10 Main (the same building I live in) for some drinks. “Why don’t we go up to the rooftop?” she suggested. “The view of Downtown is beautiful.” So she rode up to the rooftop, and Shawn and his friends (who delayed him a minute or two) followed up on the next elevator. Little did he know that this was waiting for him:
SURPRISE! We totally got him. He never suspected a thing.
Prior to Shawn’s arrival, Mikey and Otto took care of the most important piece of business related to the party – tapping the PBR keg.
Clay, Moody, Lee, the Nuh-Uh Girl, and Mikey
Joe, the mastermind behind the surprise party
This picture reminds me of an Our Gang episode from 1935 where Buckwheat was in the dark and all you could see were the whites of his eyes and his teeth. Meanwhile, Chad marvels at the wings, which came from Kooky Canuck.
So Chad went and got wings of his own, and OF COURSE the Nuh-Uh Girl picked a wing off his plate and ate it.
Lauren appointed herself protector of the Jello shots.
Full photo album will have to wait until Facebook’s buggy photo upload Java applet stops crashing my browser. Wow, pretty much anyone can write code that’s bad enough to crash IE, but crashing Firefox? That’s an accomplishment.
Food was great, friends were great, beer was outstanding. The only thing that didn’t cooperate was the weather. On October 10, it should easily still be warm enough to have rooftop parties. Not so last night. The temp hovered around 50 all night and the wind chill on the roof made it feel colder than that.
About 10:30 I made an unexpected early exit. I went to my apartment to warm up for a few minutes. I sat down in front of the laptop to check e-mail. “Hey, there’s PokerStars!” I thought. So I entered a 6-person turbo Sit’n’Go tournament, figuring those things only last about 30 minutes and then I’d head back up. I came in second, good enough to win some money, so I entered a second one. I won that one, and decided to enter a third. Third one didn’t go so well… by that point, it was after midnight, and I decided to just lie down on the couch for a while. Next thing I knew, it was 2:30 AM.
In other news this morning: Air Traffic Mike has a great blog post this morning about Ole Miss’s exit from the Top 25.
I’m up early enough to do Sunday brunch this morning, and even though I’m really not hungry yet, I guess I’ll be sociable and join the gang at the Majestic. I have a huge backlog of posts in Drafts… thinking about taking the laptop and posting from the Saucer this afternoon. Plus, I can play PokerStars. Sounds like a plan.