Birthdays, Beer and Pizza.

In the time honored tradition of birthdays I spent Thursday evening with friends celebrating our pal, Mike's birthday at Happy Joe's. Granted I've been more fond of Paradiso parties with their delicious queso and margaritas, but I don't mind a Blue Moon and a generous helping of pepperoni pizza now and then. After we stuffed ourselves, we played in the fun room arcade area and I actually found myself pumping dollars into the token machine and playing some sort of game involving balls and me aiming them. Not my forte, but I played along and was terrifickly bad.

We racked up enough tickets for a Care Bear fuzzy pen but not quite enough for the Magic 8 Ball Pam was coveting. Mike settled on the generous prize... a set of four ring suckers which left my lips an embarrassing blue for the rest of the evening... an outing to the Parrot's Cay where went to karaoke, or I should clarify, we WATCHED others do karaoke. I just can't get brave enough. Not with a crowd. I need the happy box sort of karaoke where I am safe and enclosed with only friends. Then I think I could get wild.

One highlight of the evening was running in to two former students from years ago who made me feel like a rock star and a valued person in their formative years. It apparently deserved a beer, cause that's what they did, they bought me a beer. Then they proceeded to sing the praises of our good old school and how it changed them forever, and we had a good old catching up time complete with looking at wallet pictures of adorable children and hearing gossip about other former students and all the truly great things they are up to... professional photographers and master's degrees in Chinese and the works. It all shaped up to be an entertaining evening full of unexpected adventures.