To cov­er three birth­days (Pat’s, Aaron’s, and Karen’s respec­tive­ly), we all met up at McEwen along the riv­er. The mer­ri­ment con­sist­ed of some light drink­ing, friend­ly pok­er play­ing, and rather seri­ous pho­to tak­ing.

They say that the rud­er you are, the bet­ter a pho­tog­ra­ph­er it makes you. Since being rude goes against the very basis of my per­son­al­i­ty, get­ting can­dids of peo­ple with a large cam­era and flash becomes quite a men­tal chal­lenge. Some peo­ple real­ly don’t like to have their pic­ture tak­en, and they sig­nal this by blink­ing rapid­ly with bewil­der­ment, com­bined with the fur­row­ing of their brows in annoy­ance. This reminds me that I pri­mar­i­ly bought a cam­era to have mem­o­ries of my friends, who are all com­fort­able with my paparaz­zo ten­den­cies. It cer­tain­ly makes me appre­ci­ate the strangers or acquain­tances who don’t mind.

It was also a hap­pen­stance meet­ing of the four boss­es, although def­i­nite­ly not the pri­vate affair that it usu­al­ly is.

Even before the wed­ding began, I had already unfair­ly decid­ed that I was­n’t going to have a good time. Thank god I was wrong. My ini­tial feel­ing was based on the knowl­edge that cer­tain agi­tat­ing peo­ple were going to be there — a very tan­gi­ble reminder of why we moved under cov­er of dark­ness for the last Bancroft farm excur­sion — but there were enough nor­mal peo­ple to dilute any creepi­ness.

The cer­e­mo­ny was short and sweet. The food was the best I’ve had in weeks, although my grad­ual recov­ery from viral gas­troen­teri­tis meant that I could only have half of the por­tions served. The com­pa­ny at the din­ner table was friend­ly and open enough to address every­one sit­ting (Tolstoy wrote well about such a dif­fi­cul­ty in Anna Karenina when he describes “a small table with per­sons present, like the stew­ard and the archi­tect, belong­ing to a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent world, strug­gling not to be over­awed by an ele­gance to which they were unac­cus­tomed, and unable to sus­tain a large share in the gen­er­al con­ver­sa­tion”). Aside from an idi­ot­ic anal­o­gy about aspara­gus, the speech­es were gen­er­al­ly well-writ­ten; not too trite, and all the more poignant from the emo­tion with which they were spo­ken.

Aaron was there as my wing­man, ensur­ing a good time. Jenn was there as my date, mak­ing the guys jeal­ous. I even saw Christine, although we nev­er had a chance to talk. Apparently, I missed every time she waved at us, so she may have thought that I was ignor­ing or avoid­ing her, which may be why she flicked my ear as she was walk­ing by my table. I still feel bad enough about miss­ing her last birth­day par­ty.

Until din­ner there was an open bar, with Corona and even Guinness on tap, as well as a straw­ber­ry mar­gari­ta machine that could make them like smooth­ies. After din­ner was the danc­ing, and by the time the we were through a dozen or so songs, it was already late, so we head­ed home.