I overheard one of my coworkers asking a client on a phone call today if he was going to dress up for Halloween parties this upcoming weekend.  I didn’t hear the response of the client but my coworker followed up his response announcing that he thought the guy on the phone was halloweenie.  I don’t know why it made me giggle but it did.  Actually, I know exactly why it made me snicker like a little kid, but I don’t know if my coworker really knew what he was saying. 

I was right in my post last week pertaining to the calm before the storm.  The storm that was on the horizon is Halloween.  After an exhausting weekend I climbed into bed last night at 8pm and my wife asked what my upcoming week looked like.  I had not even put a single moment of thought into this week until she asked the question.  I pulled out my calendar and scanned thru my week.

Monday: work all day and then Balloon Jam from 6-10pm.  For the record, and I can’t believe I am admitting this, I am freely skipping a Monday Night Football game to go to a balloon jam.  I hope the have the game on in the bar. 

Tuesday: work all day followed by a church meeting from 7-9pm. 

Wednesday: work all day followed by balloon twisting from 5-8pm

Thursday: work all day followed by pool league from 6:30-11pm

Friday: work all day followed by balloon twisting from 4-6pm and 7-9:30pm. 

Yep, I would say that this week is going to be rather difficult.  Something’s got to give.  Any week that I am not home any earlier than 10pm on any single night will be an exhausting one. 

This past Saturday night things got a little crazy.  One of my friends in the city hosted a gathering at his place.  Due to my wife’s upcoming work week, she chose not to go and my best friend’s wife wasn’t feeling well either so he and I were on our own for an evening of fun.  Sometimes I get sad at the fact that my best friend and I have gotten older and grown apart some.  We can’t continue to go out and party like we did as room mates throughout college.  He has a wife, I have a wife and both of us have to consider them in our plans every time we get together.  But on the rare night that we get to go out without them, we fall right back into our old ways and it’s as if we are still college roommates. 

The party Saturday night ended at roughly 6:00am Sunday morning before I finally closed my eyes wishing that I didn’t have to get up to twist balloons at a Halloween street fair in Roscoe Village in four short hours. 

Some of my favorite memories from college include Sunday mornings after long nights of drinking.  We’d wake up around noon,  order Jimmy Johns, and watch football all day while laughing about the crazy shit we did the night before.  Good times. 

While walking thru a craft fair at a festival this summer, I came across a quote that has been the theme of my life lately. I try and remember that every time I have a difficult week. 

“Lifes not about waiting for the storm to pass, but learning to dance in the rain”

This will be a week full of dancing in my life.

I think the saying goes something like “The calm before the storm” but what about the calm after the storm.  I have been on the losing end of a nut kicking competition for the past two months and for once things have calmed down.  Now that I began typing this a fear has suddenly begun to creep up within me asking if this just might really be the calm before the storm and that the past two months was merely an appeteaser (yes I just combined appetizer with teaser so you can chill out with the “No he didn’t!” thoughts) 

I am heading off shortly to go to a funeral.  It wasn’t someone that I was close to, but one of my wife’s coworkers husbands.  He was in his 50’s and a life time smoker.  He died from lung cancer.  I have some interesting emotions about people that die from lung cancer when they smoke their whole lives.  But then again, he was older and probably began at an age when smoking was a way of life.  Now you practically have to sign a death certificate and take out a loan to afford to pick up the habit.  Definitely not what it once was.  I haven’t had a cigarette in over 6 months and I haven’t even had the desire.  I can’t believe I smoked for so many years. 

On an even crazier note, the holiday inn express that I typically stay while visiting family burned down today.  They just remodeled it too. 

I have so much more to share but no time.  I’ll fill in all the details on Monday.  Have a wonderful weekend!

After a ridiculously ridiculous weekend I realized that I haven’t been on the site in a while.  I pulled it up and realized that I haven’t posted anything since the end of September which is amazing because it seems like I was ready to pull my hair out last week.  Then I remembered that I was ready to pull my hair out last week…and the week before that.  Then I realized that I have been going on like this for the past five or six weeks. 

“All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy. ”  That saying has been going on in my brain a lot lately. 

I titled this post doctober because the general theme for this month has been going to the doctor.  My wife.  Me.  My cat.  My dishwasher.  I am pretty much sick of doctors.  I have officially enacted a new “if it isn’t bleeding or broken, no doctor” rule.  For myself at least.  My wife can go whenever she wants, but not me.  When I was having a hard time walking due a pain in my left hip a week ago my doctor told me that I had a spine issue and ordered an MRI.  Three visits and hundreds of dollars later I have been told that my spine is fine and that I just need to go on a diet.  My oldest cat has been having a hard time peeing lately.  So I took her to the cat doctor and hundreds of dollars later, I am told she is fine and just has a virus.  Even my dishwasher began having problems so I had the GE guy out and he said that we “over soap” the load causing water to leak through the door and that our dishwasher was fine.  I paid a guy 140.00 to tell me to use less soap.  I laughed when he told me how much it would be.  The conversation went like this:

“So how much do I owe you?”  The GE guy replied “$140.00″.  So I asked, “Why so much?”  to which he answers “90.00 for the trip and $50.00 to diagnose the problem.”  (h, and I failed to mention that he did turn a knob on my water heater to make my water a little warmer.) An extra fifty bucks to tell me to quit using so much soap and to turn a knob a quarter of an inch.  ”Sounds good to me, do you accept credit cards?” 

The bottom line is  October has me by the short hairs.  There has been an argument going on in my brain for the past 48 hours with a general theme of being tired of doing things that I don’t want to do.  I find myself spending a large amount of my time lately doing things that don’t fall under the “I am glad i’m doing this” category.  Even as recently as last night (Sunday night) I found myself in a tuxedo downtown at a wedding missing the Bears game.  In all of my crazy football addiction I did manage to keep my eye on the score, but I won’t lie about being very angry that I actually call any person that chooses to schedule his wedding on a Sunday night during a Bears game a good friend.  Take the Bears game out of the equation and you still have a very expensive wedding taking place down town in the loop on a Sunday night when everyone has to work on Monday.  Why?  To save a few grand?  What a waste of open bar.  If you are going to drop 75K on a wedding, why do it on a Sunday night when everyone has to leave at 9:30pm.  Seems like a waste of money to me. 

Now that I think of it, the general theme of October should be “Grumpy Dennis”

I am at work today thinking about everything that is going on in my life and it’s really kind of interfering in my productivity.  So, in an attempt to get some stuff off my chest so that I can get back to work, here goes. 

In an update, my brother was released from jail on Monday and the chargest were all downgraded to a misdemeanor.  I was relieved to hear that because he is not likely to lose his job or see any jail time. 

I can’t stand it when people drop the ball.  All I will say about this is I got screwed by a few different people this week regarding a church event I am hosting and I don’t have a short term memory. 

There.  I said some things and got them off my chest.  I have so much more to say, but I have to refrain at this juncture of time.  I don’t know if this achieved what I wanted it to since I still have 100 things rattling around my brain.  Back to the hamster wheel.

It’s been 10 days since I last posted.  I blame it on a few different things. 

1. My new iPhone.  I will confess my love in the second half of this post.

2. Twitter.  I am in the early phases of testing this technology as something that I want to utilize in marketing my balloon art business (www.iloveballoonanimals.com if you have no idea what I am talking about)

3. Church overcommitment. 

But first, a quick tale about my brother.  He turned 37 on Saturday.  I called to wish him a happy birthday.  He was at the bar playing darts and drinking at 8:30pm when I called to wish him a happy b’day.  I spoke with him again around 10:00pm and he seemed fine.  I received a call from my mother at 10:00am Sunday morning informing me that my brother was in jail.  He apparently went to his wife’s apartment (they are currently seperated) and in a drunken stupor essentially knocked on the wrong apartment door and proceeded to barge into the wrong apartment.  Then when police arrived he decided that his 3rd degree blackbelt status would come in handy.  When all of that was done he thought it would be fun to break out of the cop car.  All of this netted him a two day trip to county jail where today he will stand before a judge to hear how much money he has to come up with to post bail.  They have no money.  He was arrested for breaking and entering, assaulting a police officer, and resisting arrest.  In addition to this incident my money is on the fact that he loses his job when they find out.  My sister in law spoke with him the morning after the incident and he basically told her that he didn’t remember anything really about the night up until the moment he was tasered. 

I have been praying for my brother since this incident.  I bet he never forgets this birthday.  Since he is only 4 years older than me, I have partied hard with him many a nights in college and I can’t say I ever saw him this out of control.   This incident has kind of put my own alcohol consumption and decision making into perspective. 

Twitter:  If you are on twitter and want to join me, I can be found here

Church overcommitment:  Someone came up to me two years ago and thought that a fall fest or Oktoberfest would be a great idea.  So the ball got rolling and we finally are having our first church Oktoberfest.  The only problem is that I think I and a very small group of people are the only ones on board.  The event is this upcoming Sunday and while I have lined up an awesome band, ridiculously awesome beer that will be served in 32oz mugs, great german food, and things for the kids to do, I don’t see a good turnout coming.  With less than a combination of 200 adults/children we will lose a good chunk of change.  For the record, this will be the last new event I run at church for a very long time. 

iPhone:   My love for this device can be summed up by a story from yesterday.  I was booked to entertain during a birthday party in a forrest preserve near the Wisconsin border. (literally in the middle of no where) The Chicago Bears game started at 3:00pm and I arrived at 4:45 and entertained until around 5:45pm.  While I was putting my equipment away, I pulled out my iPhone and fired up the Directv Superfan App that allows me to watch live football on my phone.  I clicked “Watch Live” on the bears game and sat my phone down waiting for the game to begin running.  Moments later, it was time to sing Happy birthday and I walked away from the phone to join in on the celebration.  I was talking with a few of the parents for a few moments and then noticed that a large group of guys were hovering around my stuff on the other side of the picnic shelter.  I walked over and realized that all of the men had found my phone lying on the picnic table and were watching the end of the bears game.  I laughed as soon as I saw what they were watching and was bombarded with 20 questions as to how on earth I could watch a Bears game live on my cellphone.  If I had a box of iphones and directv contracts I could have sold them together for 1000.00 a piece to each of the fathers that were miffed about missing the bears game for a childrens birthday party.   After nearly cancelling my Sunday ticket package from Directv, I have been sold 10 times over with the new addition of my iphone.  Since I entertain on almost every Sunday, this is now my only way to catch the NFL while entertaining.  It’s an expensive set up with 430.00 for the new 32GB 3GS  with accessories and 400 for the sunday ticket w/Superfan (which I negotiated down to 250 for everything).  But at that moment when all the dads stood in awe of technology, every penny was worth it. 

Sorry for the long post.  It’s 12:3o right now and I have to believe that my brother could be finding out any time now how much money he needs to pay to get out of the clink.  I think i’ll call his cellphone and tell him that I love him since he could probably use some love right about now.

Yesterday I made a very large decision in my life.  A decision that I haven’t made in well over 10 years.  I changed wireless carriers.  In my past life the first job I accepted when I made the decision to move to Chicago from Bloomington was as an Account Executive for Nextel.  I sold communication devices (cellphones with the two way radio) to businesses and contractors.  That was advanced technology 10 years ago.  When I left nextel, I took my  phone with me only upgrading it once over the past 10 years.  The phone I carried up until yesterday was hardly able to text, or get on the internet, much less do anything that the current line of phones offer.  For having a chunk of my professional career in wireless communications, I fell behind big time regarding technology. 

On Monday my wirless agreement expired with Sprint (Who’s customer service I found to be less than acceptable).  Yesterday I took the afternoon off for a Dr’s appt and found myself in an AT&T store.  The rep was showing me the new iPhone 3gs.  I believe at one point I may have wiped drool away from my chin it was just that awesome.  I had decided on a blackberry but was easily swayed in the iPhone direction.  I finally bit the bullet and dropped mucho dinero on the 32GB iPhone 3GS. The iPhone will be a big selling tool for me when explaining to perspective clients as to what I can do with balloons that will make them want to pick me to entertain at their next function. 

My first text on my new phone was to my best friend who has had an iPhone for several years letting him know about my purchase, to which he replied “welcome to the 21st century”.  What’s funny about that is he is exactly correct.  My previous phone might as well have been a bag phone.  ( I used to sell those BTW)

This is going to be a ridiculously crazy weekend.  In a unusual turn of events, my wife is doing a girls weekend which pretty much leaves me to do whatever I want Saturday night.  Typically I would be all over that and plan some sort of nutty night out with the guys, but that is not likely.  I am a featured entertainer for several community events this weekend.  I will be appearing at Harvard Bank’s 75th anniversary  Community Celebration as well as a strolling enertainer for the Village of West Dundee’s Heritage Festival. Click here to see me (Mister D) on Heritage fest’s website.  I am listed as Strolling on Saturday from 2-4pm (the site is wrong, I am scheduled from 3-5pm).  I love that their link on the festival website sends everyone into my own website.  That’s some awesome advertising.  I also find “strolling” a funny word for a balloon twister because I doubt that I will be walking while twisting since I usually have 50 people surrounding me when I twist at festivals.  The weather is going to be in the mid 70’s tomorrow with no rain so I would say that is about as good as it gets weatherwise for festival entertaining. 

After the second festival, I get to entertain for a private party from 6-8pm and when I am finished there,  I will either be ready for several drinks or I will be ready to collapse into my bed.  When the wife is out I usually lean towards the several drinks side, but I follow up my long day on Saturday with two events on Sunday as well, so I doubt I will go too crazy. 

There is some other major things going on in my life that I can’t reveal yet.  In time I am sure.  Have an amazing weekend!

It’s already a sore subject between the wife and I.  I have ridiculously signed up for six leagues this year and I already feel the weight of my over commitment in regards to the weekend.  On Sunday the wife and I were discussing bills when I decided to take a peek at the Directv bill.  I was stunned to see that the price for the Sunday ticket has become so much.  I was given an early renewal rate which still put the cost for the Sunday ticket plus the super fan package at 400.00.  Considering the fact that I entertain most Sundays and that I will actually find myself taking advantage of the Sunday Ticket all of five or six times this year, I can’t validate that sort of fee. That’s nearly 80.00 per weekend that I get to sit down and enjoy all of the games.  Just looking at my calendar right now, I already have bookings on 7 of the 17 Sundays during the NFL season ticket season.  Even if I didn’t book another event on a Sunday as we get closer to November, December, and January, I am looking at 40.00 per weekend to have access to all of the NFL games.  So I told the wife that I was going to cancel it. 

I called Directv with two choices for them.  I would keep the Sunday ticket if they gave me the current new subscriber promo that offered essentially every channel for six months.  Or, they could cancel the Sunday ticket and lose 400.00.  The woman I was talking to didn’t offer me option A, but did create Option C that was appealing enough to keep me as a Sunday Ticket customer.

Her offer: 20.00 off my bill each month for the 6months billing.  (120.00 off Sunday ticket package) Free Superfan plan (100.00 savings) Free DVR service for 12 months (84.00 savings) and free movie channels for 6 months (180.00 savings).  In the end a simple phone call saved me over 300.00 of what I would have paid and also an extra 180.00 for movie channels that I would have never paid for to begin with.  I’m not saying that you should call all of your subscriber based services but I can’t remember a single call that I made to any of them while not under an agreement where they were unable to cut some costs and save some money on my bill. 

Speaking of which, my cellular contract is up with Sprint and they have been f’ing up my billing. I am in the stone age in regards to cellular technology which is humorous considering when cell phones were becoming popular I sold them and was always on the cutting edge.  Now I am torn between an iPhone and a Blackberry.  My company tells me that the blackberry will be better for email with work, but the iphone would be better for promoting my balloon business.  I can’t decided and the countdown is tminus 8 days until I can finally kick my sprint phone to the curb. 

Gotta run, my 6th and final fantasy football draft begins in less than two hours.   I wonder if they offer an addiction program for fantasy sports.

Yesterday blew on all fronts.  If September maintains the suckage that was the first of Sept, then i’m in for a long long month. 

I was excited to leave the office a little early yesterday knowing this would be the only evening I would get to hang with the wife this week.  So, I was thinking about what I would cook for dinner.  As I am leaving my office, I decide to go the back way home so that I can swing by my brewing supply company to pick up the ingredients for my next batch of beer.  As I am driving I see a cop and before I know it, i’m pulled over.  As I sit there being told I was going 41 mph in a 25mph zone, I am looking up in front of my car at a 40mph sign not more than 200 yards up the road.  Apparently 40mph doesn’t begin when you see the sign as the officer informed me in high school during the classroom portion of drivers ed.  10 minutes later and a 75.00 ticket in hand I made it to the brewery supply store. Pick up the ingredients and am on my way.  The wife calls to tell me she’s working late, so I was on my own for dinner.  No biggie, since I wanted to bottle my 3rd batch of beer and get my 4th batch of beer in 1st stage fermentation.  That was my second run in with the law in less than four days. 

As a treat to myself after my ticket, I decided that I would sample my 2nd batch of beer that has been in carbonation for a week now while I was bottling batch 3 and boiling batch 4.  Batch two was a Raspberry Hefeweizen (think blue moon type beer with a raspberry flavor).  I poured it beer, it looked good but smelled horrible.  I took a drink and it didn’t taste very good either.  Batch two is a total waste.  I have almost 5 gallons (28 22oz bottles) of beer that I am not going to drink nor am I going to let anyone sample it.  Just another kick to the groin on a shitty afternoon.  A simple bump in the road as I shall call it. Batch number one which was an amber ale was ridiculously good and I could drink the stuff all day.  Batch 3 was bottled last night which is an american wheat, and batch four (Nut Brown Ale) will be ready for consumption in another two weeks.  I guess that beer making isn’t the most simple thing in the world and there will be times where I will learn from my mistakes.  I know now to never use Raspberries in beer.  What sucks is that I put so many hours into that batch.  I would guess that I worked on that batch of beer for a total of 10 hours time all together.  That and the 40 bucks for the ingredients and I’ve taken a big step backwards.  Oh well.  Hopefully for every step backwards I am able to take two steps forward. 

Back to the title.  One of my fellow employees died suddenly nearly three weeks ago.  I wasn’t close with him although my desk is all of 15 feet from his.  I had seen him in the office many times, but he was a newer employee.  My question is this.  How long after someone passes do you clean off their desk?  I walk by his desk right now and it’s the same as the day he left the office.  His photos of his family are still up, his notes for projects still sit right by his computer, it’s as if we are waiting for him to come back to the office.  I couldn’t imagine being one of the guys that sat right next or across from him having to look at it each day to be reminded of my friend that is no longer with us.  Just seems a bit weird to me. 

My final office quandry as I rarely ever talk about my day job is that they have offered to essentially cover my cellular expenses if I switch to the corporate plan.  While the 110.00 bill going away does sound nice to me, I am concerned that they will now own my phone number that I have used for a good 10 years.  My balloon business thrives on that phone number and if for some reason I left the company and they wouldn’t give me that number back, it would be downright detrimental to the balloon business since I have over 10,000 business cards floating around the suburbs of chicago with my cellphone number on it.  I was told that I could switch that number to a personal phone line before I left the company but with my luck I would get the axe and wouldn’t be able to put int he request before that and they wouldn’t give it back to me.   I have to believe they would, but do I even risk it?  My other concerns center on the fact that they essentially can look at everything I do on my phone.  While I do nothing worth hiding, I feel as if there would be a lack of privacy as if there is any such thing in todays digital age.  I am torn.  Honestly the 1400.00 a year saved would be great. 

That’s about it.  I have a crazy night tonight. I will be attempting to draft to fantasy football teams at the same time tonight which will be a first in my 12 years of playing Fantasy football.  I will be in person at one draft while doing the other online.  Hopefully all goes well, we shall see.  Have a great evening!

That’s how I feel on this Monday.  I am still hurting from the weekend. 

Before I talk about that, I would just like to send a shout out to the Village of Volo police officer that thought it would be fun to pull me over for no reason other than the fact that I made a wrong turn in an unfinished subdivision where he was sitting at a dead end.  When did making a wrong turn become an offense?  The story went like this:  I pull into my buddies subdivision in volo that is still being developed.  I missed a turn and kept going straight thinking the road curves around towards his house.  It’s pitch black as there are no street lights yet.  Before I realized, the road comes to a dead end and there in the sheer darkness is a cop car staring at me.  So, I turn around realizing that I missed a turn.  As I turn around the cop flips on his lights and began to follow me. I turn onto the road that I missed and less than a block from my friends house he flips on his lights and pulls me over.  Apparently missing a turn is “Shady”.  The cop asks me what I was doing back there, and I told him I missed a turn.  He asked me where I was headed and I told him my friends house.  He asked where my friend lived, and I responded that I didn’t know the address but he lived right around where we were.  The cop didn’t believe me and I explained that I would be happy to call my friend that lives there on speaker phone.  So, I dialed the number and while on speakerphone asked him what his address was.  “Why, you’ve been to my house several times already, you know where it is…”  I explain that I took a wrong turn and I got pulled over.  “Shut the fuck up” he says on speaker phone for the cop to hear.  “Quit fucking with me and get over here”.  So, I explained to him that an officer is listening to our call and I am close to his house.  Within 10 seconds my friend says If you are in front of that cop car with the lights, you are 5 houses down from me.  The cop turns around and sees my friend in front of his house waving.  So the officer says he will be right back with my ID and Insurance card.  Five minutes later he returns with my info and tells me to have a good night.  WTF?  What did I do wrong?  Nothing. 

That was pretty much the start of a crazy weekend.  Saturday I drove downstate to Bloomington for the 2nd of 6 fantasy football drafts this year. If I had to classify my addictions in life Fantasy Football would be one of the highest on the list.  Before the draft 8 of us went out and played a round of golf.  I said earlier this year that my game has declined so horribly and it hasn’t improved much since the last time I played.  I sucked so bad on Saturday that a friend and I decided to play Sunday morning as well before I headed back to Northern Illinois. 

Saturday night was a free for all.  I was spending the night at my friend Chad’s house.  Chad’s wife had left town for the weekend with their twins, so we were free to do pretty much whatever we wanted to do and we didn’t disappoint.  It was interesting to be in the bars that I frequented while in college and I felt like I was “that old guy” that I would always see hanging out in the college bars when I was 21 years old. It’s an interesting perspective.  One thing is certain though, girls in college today wear less to the bars and are fatter.  I hate saying it like that, but I don’t remember heavy girls happy to show every curve back when I was in college.  It wasn’t like that at just one of the bars but all five bars we went to.  I took pictures.  I don’t know if I will upload them since I don’t want to get sued or anything.  Maybe I can figure out how to smudge faces or something, but it was bad, take my word for it.

That’s it for today.  Crazy week. Tonight I am going to twist some balloons with a bunch of other balloon artists.  We meet once every two months and I have a blast every time regardless of how goofy everyone is.

Where did it go?  It hit me especially this morning as the wife was up bright and early and ready for her first day in the classroom with her new kindergarten students.  Then I heard the sounds of rain drops on the roof and turned on the news to find out it wasn’t even 70 degrees out.  Add to that the fact that my favorite time of the year is upon us (NFL Football) and it’s suddenly fall. 

This past weekend was a whirl wind of a final weekend to the summer.  For the second year in a row I entertained for the wonderful people at Willie Wonka Candies company picnic.  This is always a curve ball for me since I have to dress up in clown and I’m not a clown.  Now my wife might argue with that statement but that’s a whole different post all together.  Five straight hours of twisting while in what I have thrown together as a clown outfit.  It’s not really a clown outfit so much as my own tuxedo with a top hat, bit clown tuxedo shoes, and a few dots of makeup on my nose and around my eyes.  This year there were three of us in clown and we did pretty good considering that there must have been more than 1000 employees and their families at this event. 

After the makeup came off for the day it was time to shift into party mode since we had people coming up to stay with us to celebrate the wife’s birthday. 

As a side note, on Friday night I was up all but 2 hours cleaning in anticipation of house guests on Saturday.  So, needless to say after little sleep and entertaining children all day on Saturday I was dragging come Saturday evening. 

So, based on the reviews of my good friend tom (www.stupidtom.com) I finally gave 5 hour energy a shot to see if it was as good as Tom said.  Our first of 5 house guest arrived before I had even gotten all of the grease based makeup off my face and I quickly put the small bottle of energy down my throat as if I were doing a shot of liquor.  It tasted liquor like and within seconds it was gone. That was at 6:00pm. 

Everyone begun arriving and we all moved out to our deck where some of my home brewed beer was served for the guys and I opened wine for the wives.  We didn’t have long as it was time to round everyone up for dinner.  We were off to Blarney Island to celebrate. 

Since Blarney Island is an Island in the middle of the Chain of Lakes you can only get there via boat.  So we went to the restaurant owned by Blarney Island called “Port of Blarney” where we had dinner and boarded a shuttle boat out to the island. 

In all we had 16 people out with us when we finally got on the island.  Two of our friends each have their own boats so they each met us out there.  In the end the wife got drunk.  Drunker than I think I have ever seen.  I was thankful that she had a lot of girlfriends with her because they were pretty much dancing all night.  I kept my eyes on her as drunk ass after drunk ass would move in on all of our wives.  Occasionally one of the husbands would be dispatched to go down to the dance floor to tell some drunk guy to back off of our wives.  I kind of anticipated that as the whole group of women were all dolled up and a large majority of the dudes were there looking to hook up.  I didn’t imagine having to shield the women from another woman though as there was this one drunk woman who was a leech.  She wouldn’t keep her hands off the wives and kept telling girls in our group that she wanted to get it on with one of the wives.  That was a little over the top.  But that pretty much describes Blarney Island anyway. 

We got back home around 3am and I contemplated for just a moment about writing a letter to the 5 hour energy people suggesting they rename their product 10 hour energy because I wasn’t even remotely tired having only slept all of two hours during the previous 48.  Instead we played wii until 4:30 in the morning and I wrapped up my celebration with a beer on the deck while staring at the stars.  It was a pretty crazy day. 

Sunday was the 1st of 6 fantasy football drafts and the beginning of what just might be a wonderful fall.  Tonight I bottle my second batch of home brewed beer and i’m excited.  A hefeweizen beer that I added raspberries to during secondary fermentation. If it’s anything as good as the first batch of beer I just might be in heaven for the next few months. 

This is the second year I threw a pretty big bash for Jeanne’s birthday and it seems to be well recieved.  Not just because it’s her birthday, but I assume it has to do with the fact that her friends are mostly teachers and the day falls on the last weekend before school begins.  I’m thinking this is going to be an annual end of summer/birthday bash that I throw now.