23rd birthday party

Right after drama, I had to run home and start preparing for my birthday party. Tony was kind enough to come help me set up. I had him prepare salmon, cream cheese on a cracker. M and Jehf showed up not much longer to prepare pigs in a blanket.

The pigs in a blanket had to bake, so in the mean time, I had Jehf try and fix my network cable to my laptop. On Wednesday, when Andy had come over, I retried recrimping my network cable. I tried it 5 times with no success. The last time we tried, it looked like everything was working fine, but it just didn't work. On a fluke, on impetus from a /. forum I had read, I decided to just lick it. And to both Andy and I's surprise, it worked! But as the saliva evaporated, it would disconnect. The problem ended up being that the wires weren't pushed all the way to the top of the RJ45 head.

As Tony and M continued to prepare food, I scurried around making sure everything else was ready. 5 o'clock rolled around and I took the fastest shower that I could. I was in and out, shaving and all, in under 15 minutes. My mom ran off to a party of her own.

People started arriving around 5:30 PM EST, so I decided to go and get the food. I had placed and order with George's Deli earlier in the day for fried chicken and bbq spare ribs. Tony had parked behind me, so I asked him if he could drive me to Morristown.

I tried paying for the food with plastic, but they didn't have a credit card machine. Neither Tony or I had enough cash, so we had to make a run to the bank to make a quick withdrawal. I figured, that I was going to be charged for using the ATM, but I didn't know I was going to be charged $2 USD!

We got back to my house around 6:20 PM EST. A few other people had arrived by then. I set the food down and gathered everyone together to give thanks for the food. At the time that I ordered, I was expecting a lot more people, close to 20. The number that actually showed up was closer to 15. We ended up with a lot of extra food. Stayc had prepared nacho meat. Perna prepared perogies. By the end of the night, even with people taking food home, I had 20 ribs left and about 2-3 pounds of ground beef.

Once the food was out, I did my first shot on an empty stomach. I was quick to fill it with food. Tony and Sara were the designated mixers. I pretty much drank whatever was put in my hand.

Although music was playing the whole time since we got home, the dance party didn't really start until a little later. Once it was clear that everyone was done eating, we hit the lights and cranked the music up. We had a nice mix of techno, hip hop, and other random music. I didn't have a lot of what people wanted to listen to, so Ben downloaded Kazaa Lite K++ and started downloading other music.

Some of them came out to dance; Jehf, Todd, Ben, Sam, Shana, M (for a little bit), and Sara. Everyone else was too timid to come out. They just sat around the dinner table. Even with the lights out, they refused to come out. I acutally got on my knees and begged Stayc in Chinese to come and dance with me. No matter what I did, I couldn't get her out on the dance floor.

Towards the end of the night, some of the guys downloaded time attacks and sat around and just watched those. It was really sad, almost all the guys were sitting in front of my small laptop on the dance floor, watching someone they didn't even know, beat a video game.

Zach had gotten pretty plastered early in the night. He had a little too much to drink and ended up throwing up in my bathroom. Most of the girls were in there taking care of him. Eventually, they moved him to the guest room so he could get some rest. Being the talkative guy he was, he refused to sleep. By around 1:30 AM EST, he was sober enough to drive home.

As the night wound down, a few people began trickling through out the door. I went to play Hold'Em with Will and Sam, $4 USD buy in. It was my first time playing either of them, so I started out slow and conservative. As I learned how they played, the types of hands they played so on and so on, I became more aggressive. I, of course, continued to play smart, folding trash hands pre-flop, and folding unfavorable flops. I eventually won in the end, up $3 USD. Afterwards, we sat around and talked about the value of the check-raise. Then we moved onto the topic of investments, specifically in real estate.

All in all, we had a great time.

The last people left around 2:30. I spent the next 30~40 minutes cleaning up the stuff that had to be cleaned up. I bagged the left over food and tossed it into the freezer. I wiped down the tables and the counters so not to attract ants. And I put all the trash into garbage bags.