Pizza and a Costume Party

We can had a couple select birthdays to celebrate last week. The first was on Thursday for Jon Paper, who threw a fairly impromptu dinner party down at Old Chicago in Bellevue. It was a great excuse to see a couple long lost friends and gorge on some giant deep dish pizza together.

On Saturday, we celebrated our friend Jenny's 30th birthday party in style — at our house! For the last couple of years, our mutual friend Hugh has been gracious enough to host Jenny's birthday parties, but this year we gave him a break to worry about getting married and offered to have Jenny's party at our house down in Bellevue.

As usual, it was a costumed affair, with many creative entries from our collection of crazy friends. Among the highlights were Lisa as her second childhood, Eric as a cop from Reno 911 (with extremely short shorts), Jon as God's gift to women, Rick as a worm-ridden zombie, Frank as a big chicken, Merinda as a creepy doll, and Jenny with a Cookie Monster party dress. Vivian's trying to keep her costume a surprise until this weekend. I came as Inigo Montoya, complete with long, curly tresses, rapier, and name tag. We hung around into the wee hours of "stupid o'clock" dancing and playing with balloons in the basement. Kevin also commented on the "crouching cauliflower, hidden broccoli" in the veggie tray, a phrase destined to become a T-shirt. (I still don't get it.)

We had plenty of food and drinks to go around, and we got to burn off most of them on the dance floor in our basement. It was the first time we got to use the tiled portion of our basement for any serious dancing, but it worked out pretty well, especially thanks to Dan Wondra's Tailgater sound system. Of course, our dancing including a performance of Thriller out on the driveway, which seemed to go over pretty well.