Scurvy Dogs, they threw me overboard!

Rob picked me up around 5PM on Friday night and I was in full pirate gear. A great hat and eyepatch from Vero’s disguise box (as she likes to call it. I prefer the term ‘tickle trunk’). I was also going as Captain Unibrow Pete so I applied some makeup to form a nice looking unibrow!

In I jumped into a van of rowdy ten-year olds and I chuckled to myself as they wanted to show off their costumes. One kid was quite proud of the chest hair he had painted onto his chest. Was I this rowdy as a kid? Probably.

The murder-mystery party/pirate mutiny turned out to be a decent time in my opinion. Rob and I discussed it afterwards and we found that even as adults, I don’t think we could have figured out the solution to who of the crew threw Captain Unibrow Pete overboard, so we can only imagine how hard it was for the group of kids. But they were having a great time. Everyone came in costume, everyone had swords…what more can you ask for at a birthday party? Swordfights were going on at a constant pace as First Mate Robbie Burns and I passed out clues, read pages of dialogue to push the story forward.

If you are not familiar with a murder mystery event, let me explain a few things. You start off with a mystery…who threw Captain Unibrow overboard? Then everyone gets clues…some clues are meant to be hidden from others…basically a ‘For your eyes only’ clue. Others are meant to be said aloud to the rest of the party to give them hints as to who was involved or not. Then, as everyone had read their clues aloud, another round comes into play and another set of clues to further the story arrives. There were five rounds in total, the sixth round being the round where everyone’s story comes out and the solution is revealed. I thought this round was great as everyone had made their picks for who they thought was responsible and then as soon as they realized they got something wrong, they just went about their night instead of listening to the rest of the solution!

After some pizza, cake, swamp juice (a concoction of whatever soft drink you can mix find!) and some gift giving to Ryley, the night was over and we headed back to Rob’s where we hung out for awhile. All in all, it was probably the most fun I’ve had at a birthday party in years!

Saturday morning I woke to the phone ringing at 9AM. I rolled over and ignored it. But then the phone rang a SECOND time which brings out fear in me…is this an emergency? Has someone fallen down a well? Is The Beer Store on fire? Of course I jump out of bed and find a message from Holly asking if we want to go out for breakfast for Joelle’s birthday. She told me later that she phoned the first time and thought “Ooh, I wonder if this is too early” and didn’t bother leaving a message. But then she phoned back the second time thinking “Well, the least I can do is leave a message.” which triggered my panic. Smooth move Holly!

All kidding aside, we headed to Broadways which is home to my favourite Philly Steak sandwich…mainly because they put hot banana peppers on it. Yum! Joelle, Holly, Vero and I chatted about everything under the sun and I had so much fun that I think I shall have breakfast more often in the future. However, if you all know me, you know that I don’t really like breakfast so I’ll order from the lunch menu if possible.

We headed home where I played a few more levels of Plants vs Zombies and then we finally cleaned up the house. We stripped all the Christmas party decorations down, cleared out all of our Christmas gifts that we had dumped into the house before heading to Brazil, and gave the house a good scrubbing. It’s looking a little better now, although the garage is chaos and my office is the last resting place of all sorts of junk. Sigh…

Mike and Trish came over later that night to hang out. Trish ended up getting me the Star Wars cookbook for Christmas which have some hilarious recipes (like the Han-Burger!) and she also made me a fridge magnet with a Boomerang Bros from Super Mario Bros! Awesome!

We hung out for awhile, had some beer and then watched a documentary on Mike and my favourite film, Dazed and Confused. Mike had ordered the Criterion Collection version which had a bunch of special features. I then proceeded to pass out while Mike and I started watching Pink Floyd’s The Wall and headed to bed. Classic Palmer move.

The next day Vero went to a theater practice..she’s in a new play scheduled to debut in…May? June? I basically laid down for the entire day and watched Being Erica, which is a decent premise for a show – girl with problems has a therapist that can send her back in time so she can fix her regrets.

All in all, I would say it was the best weekend…one that is productive, but one that is relaxing at the same time!