Camping Shenanigans

It was a month ago today, so figured I could write about it now. I had a great week leading up to July 4th. A group of my friends go camping up at Timothy Lake every year for July 4th, (as my birthday is July 5, it becomes a week long birthday celebration too). This year I turn 30, so I was determined to have a great time and celebrate. I am sometimes surprised I’ve made it this far, given I am extremely clumsy. I mean… I have been known to walk off a cliff in the pitch black night, fall out of trees and generally just trip and stumble here there and everywhere, luckily never while crossing the road with on coming traffic.

So anyways… we were up the mountain at Timothy Lake, sleeping in tents and keeping warm by the camp fire. The days were gorgeous perfect temperatures in our shady spot by the creek. However, at night… at night it was really cold, so cold in fact that the ice in our coolers refroze and we had to pry our food from the ice blocks. You may think I am exaggerating but I kid you not, it really was that cold at night, you just have to love those mountain summers. OK, to be perfectly honest, it was only that cold the first 2 nights, it did start to warm up a little as the week progressed.

We pretty much spent the week drinking and talking, playing drinking games such as drink while you think. Been as we had a lot of fruit and plenty of vodka and gin, we decided to make up some jungle juice. We thought that one of the empty 2 gallon water jugs would make a great container for said juice, so we got to squishing berries, oranges and limes in Ziploc bags, mixing in a little vodka while still in the squishing process. Once the berries were squished we cut a corner in the bag and poured it into the water jug thingie. Then we added the vodka, gin, lemonade, and pretty much anything else we could find that would taste good. Then we left it in a cooler of ice for a few hours. Oh my, it was so tasty. We purposely didn’t make it too strong either, thinking if people wanted it stronger they could add more berries/juice, erm i mean, more vodka or gin to their serving. Good times.

I spent a total of 4 nights up on the mountain, the wbf came out to join me for the last 2 nights, he couldn’t come sooner because he had to work. Well, when he arrived I was so happy, not just to see him, as I had missed him after 2 lonely nights in a very cold tent, but because he had a car full of balloons. By the way I love balloons, they just make me smile. He originally had brought 10, but 3 hadn’t made it, but I didn’t care, 7 big shiny balloons all for me. I was requested to tie them to my chair, and I felt like the birthday queen. I was all happy, that is until, all the small children started eyeing up my balloons… then started to ask me if they could have one. There were a lot of kids camping with us, and I knew as soon as I gave one away, they’d all be gone. I normally have no problems with sharing, but on this occasion I felt very selfish I wanted my balloons to myself, and I didn’t want them flying off into the woods and up the mountain, or getting popped near the campfire. So, I managed to negotiate, that they could have one (which they got right before bed time, when they went to bed we snagged it back and passed it on to the next child), seemed to be a win-win.

All in all, it was a great week. I’ll tell you more about the week in my next post.

99 Red Balloons - Or actually 200+ Multicoloured Balloons

I finally got a good night sleep last night, there were no raccoons partying outside my bedroom window, and I kept my coffee intake to a minimum yesterday. I also have a feeling that carrying crates of beer from my friends car to the office, along with 26lbs of ice also helped to wear me out.

Every 3rd Thursday of the month, we have a party in my building at work. Each floor takes a turn to host the party. Its funded by employees, and works quite like a pot luck. This was the 3rd one that my floor has hosted, and for some reason, its always me who gets involved in the party planning. Not that I am complaining, I actually quite enjoy party planning.

We seem to have lots of parties at work these days, I think a lot of it stems from the fact that you don't have to drink to work here, but it really does help. As well as having parties, we also like to do fun stuff for peoples birthdays. The most recent was for one of my team mates. He was out of the office on the day of his birthday, so we decided it would be fun to fill his cubicle with balloons.



As you can see, we take our work very seriously indeed.