roshan

Beer Train 2009

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Before I went off to Alex's birthday party, I made 7 dozen buttons for Beer Train 2009. Beer Train is a pub crawl that starts in Sunnyvale, ends in Belmont, takes all day, tours five bars, and is the social event of the year. One could say decade, except that it happens every year.

Doyle asked me to make the buttons. Given how much I lurve my buttons, a chance to break out my button maker cannot be passed by.

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I hurried home after eating my cupcake and jumping in the jump house and, of course, giving Alex the biggest hug and thanks before he went down for his name, I dashed back home to pick up Kris. Kris has signed up for Beer Train. I had not. I figure, dang, man, the whole day to myself without any client expectations or work to do? Sign me up for that, not an always-on drink fest. I know how to take care of my not-so-inner introvert.

I had to wait a short while after dashing home for Kris to finish up his work. He had originally intended to work late last night, get up around six am, go for a training run before the temperature outside was too hot, finish up any work he needed to do, then head to Beer Train. I somehow, I'm still not sure how, convinced him that, no, he needed sleep. If he was going to spend all of today drinking, and going to bed fairly late, something had to give: work or run, but not sleep. Definitely not sleep.

He was still working when I arrived back home, making me even more satisfied that I had convinced him to do the right thing.

Around 1, I drove Kris to the downtown Sunnyvale starting pub. We had a slightly difficult time finding the right bar, as, for some retarded reason, the short block of Murphy Avenue from Washington to Evelyn has four bars, two of them with Murphy in their names.

Eventually we found the place, and I dropped both Kris and the buttons off.

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On my way out of the bar, Kyle and Colleen, both conductors on the beer train, were across the street, having lunch before the train rides. I wandered over to talk to them, and had a wonderful conversation with them. The topic wasn't always so wonderful (cancer came up), but catching up with the highlights of their lives was great.

I went home and spent the day putzing. I did laundry. I sorted crap on my desk. I scanned papers. I walked the dogs. I caught up on tasks. Essentially, I had great day, doing nothing much, and lots, all at the same time.

Meanwhile, Kris was off on his grand drinking train adventure. At one point, there were two stations within Palo Alto, so Kris and Andy left the first bar with everyone else, and ran, drunk, to the next station. They ended up running along the tracks, hopping fences, getting stuck on the fences, stopping, almost puking but not quite, arriving early enough to watch the rest of the train pull into the station. I'm not sure if the run was worth the puking, but the adoration from the rest of the group seemed to be.

I wish I had left my second camera with Kris.

Around 10PM, I hopped into my car, and drove up to Belmont, where everyone was at the last bar on the trip. I arrived, and was immediately confronted with a confessions from Kris. He prefaced with, "I have a drunken confession to make, are you ready for it?" What is a girl to think with this introduction?

Well, turns out, two female friends on the trip were having a contest to see which could kiss the most number of boys on the ride up. Kris was willing, and kissed one of them. He was okay with it, she freaked out a little bit. When he told me this, all worried and innocent-like, I burst out laughing. I then went up to the friend and let her know that I was humoured by the incident and in no way upset.

Really, I think Kris has a long way to go before he catches up to me on the scanalous things I've done while married. A LONG way.

Some time later, Roshan came up to me and relayed a conversation he had had with Kris earlier, which also humoured me.

"So, Kitt is picking you up from the Sunnyvale train station?"

"No, she's coming up here to pick me up."

*blink*

*blink* *blink*

"You have the best wife ever."

"Ssssh! Don't tell anyone. I don't want to share."

We ended up dropping Beth and Jeremy off in Palo Alto (with a running commentary on my driving from Jeremy that clearly indicated he had never driven in Los Angeles), and Andy at his home, before heading home. I made sure Kris drank a LOT of water before going to bed. Here's hoping for no headache in the morning.

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Clearly twice as sexy

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Roshan heard that babies are chick magnets. In an attempt to realize this potential, he walks around with Danger and Mirabelle every chance he gets.

My only suggestion would be to ask non-married women to enhance his chick-magnet technique.

Prom!

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Last night was prom. My date was the self-proclaimed Worst Prom Date Ever, which is to say, the organizer, and not really the worst prom date ever (unless you include the abandoning in the middle of prom, the pizza dinner, the forced labor and the sour towel, then maybe). Actually, I'm exaggerating for effect, Roshan did get me a beautiful red rose corsage (passion!), and really wasn't the worst date ever: he left me for his girlfriend (reasonable, considering I was forewarned), the pizza dinner was very tasty, the decorating committee needed the extra two sets of hands and the towel was presumably clean.

I showed up late at his house, the truck having recently gone out in the Great Grand Birthday Sandbox Adventure with Mike for Liza. We dashed off to get a keg, then another keg, and another one. If you ever decide to purchase a keg from a microbrewery, standing at the back gate, rattling it, howling at the top of your lungs, "WHERE IS MY KEG!?" won't endear yourself to the staff. Neither will trying to crack their combination lock. Even if you've already paid for said keg.

The combo is 0351, by the way.

We dashed off to Mitchell Park after stopping by Roshan's house to pick up the rest of the alcohol. I had two awesome cookies, baked by Roshan's housemate, Matt, who was his high school prom king (and, well, looked the part). We arrived first at the community center, and started unpacking the alcohol into the mini-gym/dance floor/hall. As we were finishing up, the decorating committee arrived: Joy, Lisa, Eric, and three others.

The decorations were blue cellophane sheets hung all around the walls, with hand crafted fish, lights and streamers. The fish were amazing. Personally, I would have drawn one of the fish, colored it, taken it to Kinko's, made fifty copies, then cut them out. Instead, Lisa cut out and glued each color out of construction paper, and these things were seriously detailed. Incredibly impressive.

We had arrived early to give the band cashola and spent a little time talking to one of the band members. She was reviewing the lyrics of the songs I think Roshan had asked them to play. She looked at me and said, "I've never heard of half these songs." I chuckled at the time, and later realized, when she was singing back up to the songs, that, well, she hadn't know half the songs because she was in kindergarten when they were first released. I, on the other hand, was in high school. Punk kid.

People started trickling in at 9, when prom was supposed to start. Roshan commented he really needed to tell people 8, since no one showed up until 9:45 anyway. A friend of Roshan's showed up on time, and so spent some time talking to me. My teammate Adam showed up soon after, with his date. When he realized no one had really shown up yet, he left. I turned to AJ, the guy I was talking to, and said, "Yeah, his real prom was about 3 weeks ago." AJ responded, "Heh. I guess this prom isn't much of a novelty for him then." "Yeah, unlike us whose prom was over a decade ago."

He turned to look at me, shocked. "Over a decade?"

I didn't have the heart to tell him, yeah, actually closer to two decades.

Eventually, Kris and Katie (yay, a date for my husband!) showed up, with Doyle and Heather. Doyle spent what seemed like the first hour on his cell phone with Brynne, who was saying crazy stuff, almost giving him permission to make out with Heather, or something like that. I think Brynne was drunk. Warren, Jess, Jess, Beth, Forker!, Paul, Shwu! and other teammates and friends starting showing up, which made the evening much better, my date Roshan being off playing host and spending time with his other date. She didn't seem to appreciate my presence, refusing to dance with me. Which entertained me to no end, with her being the "other woman" from my perspective.

Around midnight, I took off the 3" strappy heels Heather loaned me to go with the amazing dress she loaned me. It took me that long to realize that 1. I can't walk in 3" heels, no matter how much I like to pretend I'm a girl, and 2. 3" heels do not help an injured knee.

Katie sat next to me while I rested my feet, and we talked for a bit (where talking amounted to screaming at each other over the music). At one point, she yelled over to me, "Whatever you do, don't look to your left."

Which caused me to look to my left immediately.

And catch a woman with her head buried into the crotch of the guy standing in front of her, his belt undone, and his pants unzipped.

I immediately turned back to Katie, "Aaauuugh!" She laughed. The couple spent the next hour in some sort of connected body contortions. We were able to catch a picture of the two of them only after they had sufficiently untangled themselves. Good times.

All in all, a fun night. Strangely enough, the amount of alcohol consumed per pound of flesh at this Prom was remarkably similar to the amount of alcohol comsumed per pound of flesh at my high school prom. About 60 bottles of wine and maybe 20 glasses of beer were consumed by about 120, maybe 140 people.

Yeah, that's about right.

My Flickr photos of Prom || My Gallery photos of Prom