Exactly one year ago today, I was doing this. Even though the annu­al par­ty at Chris and Clarmen’s actu­al­ly starts on the 25th, I real­ly see it as a box­ing day par­ty, the way a New Year’s par­ty real­ly starts on the 31st of December.

That night we used the excuse of going to Timmies for all the par­ents as a way out of the house to have a ses­sion. Unfortunately, this meant remem­ber­ing about a dozen drink orders, some­thing that proves dif­fi­cult under the influ­ence.

In chrono­log­i­cal order:

1. We met up at the house, where Darren’s fin­gers brave the tur­tles
2. A ses­sion occurred out­side, and on the way to Timmies we intro­duced Chris to Dreamtheater (hence the music selec­tion)
3. An order is made for about a dozen drinks with great dif­fi­cul­ty
4. We drove back to play Slap Hand, which is a vari­a­tion on Slap Jack, except the pile is hit every time the cor­rect num­ber is called (and for increased dif­fi­cul­ty we played with +/- rules where the pile is only hit if the num­ber spo­ken is an addi­tion or sub­trac­tion of a dif­fer­ent spec­i­fied num­ber)
5. Darren ran­dom­ly deals every­one a hand of hold ’em and plays it through, and this caus­es me to make fun of his obvi­ous addic­tion
6. Darren pre­cise­ly deals a full hand of 13 cards for a game of Asshole, while talk­ing, for which I count my cards in dis­be­lief and final­ly real­ize just how much he plays cards

Other signs of how stoned we were:

• Darren and Chris’s voic­es drop an octave, while my voice rais­es two (two!)
• I can’t keep my jit­tery hands under con­trol
• The way Chris says, “Just awe­some guys. Awesome.”
• At one point we have to stop to count to the right num­ber in Slap Hand
• I laugh, a lot

This year, today, Lam joined us instead since Darren is off in Las Vegas.