None So Blind

I should have seen that coming.
Only no one's ever thrown me a surprise party, or a surprise gathering, or...a surprise...thing...before.

So it wasn't in the repertoire of things I was expecting. I wasn't expecting anything. Krissa was convinced that I knew, what with our group of friends going in for surprise parties a lot and the classic set-up, but I just didn't see it.

So much so that when we were standing outside the Belgian place near my office with everyone, unbeknownst to me, waiting inside, I was about to propose that Krissa and I have a cocktail in the bar next door because I'd seen it a few times and wanted to give it a try.

That's how unsuspecting I was.
So it was a surprise.

The word surprise looks weird right now.

It was my 26th birthday on Monday.
Krissa set last night up by asking if I wanted her and I to have a date for my birthday, which was a great idea, I thought, because celebrating in the lushly forested wilds lacks a little something in the way of sophistication, even if being woken in a tent with a cupcake and a candle in was grin-inducingly wonderful.
So people ate moules et frites and drank Trappist beer from bottles with pink elephants on the labels and Shana laughingly began her one-woman anti-television crusade with her TV-B-Gone keyring.

On to a bar, and we sequestered a loungey area at the back of the place behind the pool table and laid out a couple of hours of music on the jukebox. Mark and I won the pool table from two loud, rotund and sneeringly rude barflies (so very, very satisfying) and so everyone played pool and drank and laughed at the jukebox selections and talked about camping and Maine and Alias and fishing and England and New York.

It were reet good.
Thanks for coming along, everyone who was there, and if you weren't there, you were fondly missed.