Hello everyone in Blog-land! As seems to be the trend lately, I’m about two weeks late getting a post put together to let you know what I’ve been up to. As usual, there really aren’t any really good excuses, I’ve just been traveling a bit for work lately, and doing lots of training, as well as hosting Jody’s parents for a week. However, I’ll fill you in a little bit on the latest happenings. The most significant news of late is of course that I’ve earned another candle on my cake of life. Yup, on May 31st I turned the ripe old age of 32. Or as Jody decided to put it on my birthday cake, I was celebrating my sweet 16 times two. To celebrate, we decided to have another little party at our place. Read on for a few more gory details of the evening in question. You can also check out some pics.
To start things off, my actual birthday was on May 31st, which as you may have noticed, occurred on a Thursday this year. As a result, we weren’t going to host a party on my actual birthday. No one would be willing to let their hair down in the mid-week. Not to mention the fact that I was actually in Montreal for most of that week for work. So, was it to be the weekend before, or the weekend after? Well, as you may have read from my previous blog posting, I had a bit of a race to take care of the weekend before. Namely, racing the National Capital ½ Marathon in 1h28min. So, that left us the weekend after my birthday.
The other issue with leaving the planning to pretty much the last minute was that we had no idea how many people we might expect to show up. When Jody had asked me whether or not I wanted a party or to do something special for my birthday, my initial reaction was that I wouldn’t bother this year, since it was too short notice. In the end, my old party ways won the internal debate, and I decided that we might as well invite the crew over, and whoever could make it would be fine. After all, I can’t recall ever not having a great time at my own parties ;-). After all, I get to choose my own music, and help myself to my own private collection of booze!
The lovely Jody was kind enough to take care of sending out an invitation to all the usual suspects while I was out of town on business, and I added a few new names when I had a chance to review it. By the time I was getting set to roll back into town, it looked like there would be about 20 people coming over. That’s pretty much an optimal number in my opinion. Yay! Now I just had to get ready to have some fun and to plan some training around the party.
Luckily, some of my tri-training friends took care of that for me. There was a nice 100+ km ride in the works for Saturday morning, which would give me time to get out for that, and back in time to shower and put on my birthday suit… make that my party suit, before the guests would show up. Huzzah. Sadly, the weather man was calling for rain later in the day. Luckily, I’ve set up a sun / rain tent on the deck, so regardless of the weather, the party would go on. Not only that, but there’s plenty of room indoors for the crew that was slated to come over.
Saturday rolled around, and I got up for my leisurely bike ride in the country. Yeah right. The sad fact is that even though I’ve been doing a lot of training, I hadn’t been out for a bike ride over 100km in over 8 years. Thankfully, my base endurance level meant that I was able to almost keep up with my rolling companions, but not without giving myself a pretty good winding! Also, the overcast day slowly turned into a mainly sunny day, and my lack of sunscreen meant that I picked up a nice lobster-like glow in time for the party. Oh well, I’m sure the beer would take care of that.
By the time I got back home, the lovely Jody had made some amazing progress on the party prep front. As usual, she made what seemed to be far too much food for the event, out-doing herself yet again. I grabbed my shower and put on a shirt that Jody had brought me back from her recent trip to Vietnam. Sweet. All that was left to do was wait for the guests to arrive. It also looked like the weather would continue to co-operate with us. When people started to arrive, we stayed outside as long as we could.
There was still one wild card in this party though. The Ottawa Senators. Yup, they were playing game 3 that night, after losing the first two games in Anaheim in the finals. I really didn’t want to deal with unruly, depressed party-goers, so I was sending out all my best vibes for us to win this one. As luck would have it, they did win. And as we would later find out, this was to be the only victory for the Senators in that entire series. Perhaps I should have had a party every night of the playoffs
All in all, I think a good time was had by all. Early in the day, we had the entire Lacroix clan, including the new addition to their family, Claire. We also had our beautiful little niece to entertain us. It was all good fun. Where we normally had the guys in the yard goofing off, we instead had the little ones. However, as the time wore on, and the youngins made their way back home, the boys got back up to their old tricks. Jody had bought some over-sized balloons with elastics attached so that you could put them around your hand and use them like punching bags. Well, you can only imagine how long those lasted. The big Jonah-nator made short work of two of them right off the bat by biting into them. Too funny.
Later on, after we moved indoors, the Mexican wrestling masks came out, and the Guitar hero was also turned on. By that time, Rob was starting to look a little bleary-eyed. I have a feeling that perhaps it had something to do with a certain vile cocktail that one Matt Scase concocted behind the bar. I think it involved rimmer, rum, some kind of mixer, a gummy worm, and perhaps a number of other things that we are not aware of. This was given to Rob to drink, and even he was a little apprehensive. Shortly after that drink, it became obvious that Rob was no longer feeling so great
I could go on at greater length and detail about the evening, but I would imagine that very few of you that weren’t there are all too interested in that. Once again, I was touched by having people come out and celebrate my birthday with me, as well as for Jody’s efforts to make sure that I spend a truly happy birthday with my closest friends. Thanks to all of you that stopped by and made the day and night memorable for me. If you didn’t make it by this year, have no fear, this tends to be a yearly affair. See you around kids! Up next, a posting about my recent race result at the Riverkeeper Kayak triathlon at Westboro beach.
