My Crazy Weekend

I think I have finally recovered enough from my weekend to talk about it. Things picked up speed pretty quickly and only just slowed down. Friday night I saw The Dark Knight. I posted a review on Surfer J's Reviews. This was such an intense movie. I could say more about it here, but this is gonna get long enough as it is. Check out my review (The Dark Knight ). This was only the beginning.

I had been planning my wife's surprise party for over a month. Saturday was the big day, almost exactly a month later than the actual event. She turned 30, so this needed to be a pretty good party. It is almost impossible to surprise my wife. Even when I manage to pull it off, she somehow guesses at the last minute. This is so consistent that I have to try extra hard each time to come up with something that she won't possibly guess. This meant I couldn't buy any supplies until the day of. I had a three hour window to pull it all together. My wife's close friends came over to serve as decoys, and one of them brought her husband with her. He had to get out at the Subway restaurant across the street from my house so my wife wouldn't see him. We had everything planned to the last detail. :)

My son decided it was time to throw an "I need a nap" tantrum seconds before our friend arrives to help. I was cleaning all morning. My wife commented on this to her friends when they arrived, but she still didn't catch on. She told them, "He even vacuumed." I don't vacuum. My wife is a Stay At Home Mom, so she usually has all the vacuuming done before I get home. This was the first time I turned on the vacuum. It feels really weird to say that. Moving on, she didn't know why I was cleaning all morning. I cleaned a little more when our friend arrived, and put him to work. A little cleaning and then babysitting a sleeping toddler were his duties. I had to run to Costco to get the cake.

I wasn't sure what to expect from the Costco cake. You go in, with at least 24 hours notice, fill out a sheet of paper and drop it in the slot. You then have faith that the cake will be ready at the time you indicated. My wife loves carrot cake, so I ordered a carrot cake. This cake is HUGE. $18.99 gets you a cake big enough to feed 48 people (in small pieces. A little less with bigger pieces). It came in at half the price the local bakery was going to charge me. The cake was worth it. I am still eating it.

So, cake in hand, it is time to get some more supplies from the grocery store. I ran into one of my friends at the grocery store. He had been buying flowers for my wife. I sent him to the Dollar Tree to pick up balloons and crate paper so we can decorate. He improvised and bought a birthday table cloth (paper). It turned out to be something we needed. We met back at my house, and had 30 minutes until my wife and her friends were due.

The boy woke up during the babysitting. He had already been upset that Mommy went somewhere, so I figured he might not like waking up to find out he was being babysat by a virtual stranger. They haven't seen each other in a long time. I knew how to get around this though. As I left I told our friend that if he wakes up, just turn on Star Wars. It worked like a charm. My son was very pleasant when I got back home. He had his Darth Vader fix.

I found out that my charcoal was a little wet, so I needed to babysit the coals for a bit. This left my friends to finish decorating without me. I got the coals lit, and only needed to re-light them twice.

I grilled up a tri-tip, using a great Guinness Tri-Tip Marinade recipe. My wife came up with the basics, and I made my own version of it for her party. We made some fresh salsa and guacamole, deep fried some flour tortillas to use as chips, and made tacos out of the tri-tip.

My friend bought some noisemakers and distributed them. My wife's friend kept us updated through subtle text messages and seemingly random phone calls to her husband. My son loved the noisemakers, and almost gave the surprise away. He was blowing the "horn" as she was walking up. We got him to quiet down and sent him to open the door. This is not uncommon, so when we shouted surprise and blew the noisemakers, she was taken aback. The surprise worked. She had no clue that we had all conspired to throw the party.

The food and company were great. We had a lot of fun.

Our weekend took a more serious turn with news of an impending divorce among a couple of our friends. This put a dark cloud on the rest of the weekend, and needless to stay it is still hanging around.

We went to the 3rd Annual Pirate Festival in Ventura on Sunday afternoon. My son was in a weird mood, so we didn't stay long. He loves pirates, boats, water, and parrots. He got to see all of it. We watched a guy swallow a sword, walked around a bit, and finally left. There were tons of people around but not much to do. It was still worth checking out, so I am glad we did.

All in all, the weekend provided an intense emotional roller-coaster. Batman is pretty intense. The birthday party brought us up pretty high, and the news from our friends sent us plunging pretty low. We are hoping to plateau for a while. We need to recover a bit.