I just got home from Charlie’s birthday party – he turned 1 today! Charlie is the son of my friends Juls and Joan. We went to Joan’s grandparents house today for the party along with 20 friends. There’s a pool there and this 90 degrees heat has gotta settle down!
Jan and I started off by meeting Natalie and Paul just a few blocks away from our house. They have a car and the party was out in the country. Paul and Nats were about 20 minutes late which normally wouldn’t be that big a deal, but we had to wait outside in the 1pm heat with no shade to protect our delicate bodies. This 90 degrees heat has gotta settle down!
We then proceeded to get horribly lost and it took us about an hour and a half to make the half hour drive. When we arrived, everyone was already there and belly-flopping away without us. Our frowns soon turned upside-down as we did handstands, swam under leg bridges, performed some group syncronized swimming, and saw who could swim the furthest under water (Derek beat me by almost an entire length!).
Then came the quiz! I was volunteered as the party’s quiz MC by Juls (who loves quizzes) so I had spent a good four hours the day before preparing questions and song snippets for the “name that tune” section. It was tedious work deciding how much of an intro to include for each song and then cutting, fading, and normalizing each sample. I’m a nerd so I enjoy that sort of busy work. The quiz was a whopping success and everyone had a great time – myself included.
Most people left when the sun went down (a little after 9pm), but our car stayed a few hours later to help clean up and just chill on the terrace with all the left-overs while Juls fell asleep with Charlie and Joan noisily returned to the back yard the entirety of the alcohol he had consumed. A good time was had by all.
Oh! But then came a definite highlight. I was the designated driver for our car and, one minute after leaving the house, I was pulled over by a police road block. I was a little nervous simply because I don’t have a Spanish driver’s license. The officer asked me if I had my own mouthpiece for the breathalizer (which I thought was weird) but I didn’t so they gave me one and made me blow into the little contraption. I was so excited because I had never taken a breathalizer test before. I scored a 0.0 and the officer, with an impressed look on his face, waved us off into night.