Allow Me To Introduce: The Best People Ever, originally uploaded by robotpolisher.

Step 1: have best birthday of your life.

So I did a lot of dithering about what kind of thing I actually wanted to do for my birthday. Small informal gathering, big blow out shindig, fishing trip, solo sulking? In the end I settled on having a big ol' BBQ and full on Kubb tournament in prospect park followed by some proper drinking, pool-shooting and taco eating at San Loco. Brilliant.

So then of course in the week leading up to the whole thing my nervousness is mounting. Will the thing work? Will people show up? Can I actually get my slacker friends organized into a for-real tournament? Would it stop snowing and actually be nice enough to be out?

But when I got up on the 14th the snow was gone, the sun was out and much to my surprise my knees only creaked a little more than they had when I was 30. Finally after a stressful morning of getting all the required BBQ ingredients together with Jessie, Jeremy & Sarah, we ended up in the park which was nicer and warmer than it had any right to be and blessedly kind of empty. I was a little worried at first that we'd shown up 30 minutes late and nobody else was there, but seemingly I'd forgotten the rule that nobody I know shows up to anything less than an hour late.

But soon the whole thing was in full swing, beers being rapidly consumed, stuff grilling, me yelling at people through a bullhorn to get the whole tournament started. Which, I'm proud to say, went off really well. It ended up being whole fairly complicated double elimination tournament of randomly assigned teams and other than the fact that my team got utterly spanked, the whole thing was really fun. At the end of the day after a stirring Kazoo rendition of The Final Countdown and the Canadian National Anthem, Kubblic Enemy were presented with the Hello My Name Is Kubb Championship Trophy which they get to hang onto until next year, Stanley Cup style, they have to pass it on to the next winners.

All the kubb stuff aside, it was just really humbling to have that many people (the picture above's just a portion of them) showing up on your account. My sister and Milo came from Jersey which was great. lots of people I haven't seen in a while crawled out of whatever rock they'd been under and out into the spring. At one point I was walking back down from the picnic house towards where we were all set up and I seriously had this taken aback moment seeing a whole milling around crowd of people having a good time and basically realizing how lucky I am to have such a large mob of awesome friends.

(I later proceeded to by the end of the evening get drunk enough to tell everyone how awesome I think they are. But hey, it was from the heart.)

All of that over, most of the folks trekked up to Williamsburg to San Loco which has worked its way up to being just about my favorite bar in Williamsburg on account of the pop punk soundtrack, 50 cent empty pool table, margaritas and of course the catfish guaco loco. Once there, I proceeded to play a lot of fun pool, engage in by turns insightful or idiotic conversations... basically it was the perfect capper to what had already been the best birthday a guy could plan for himself.

Basically I'm screwed next year as it's gonna almost certainly have to be a notch down..

Step 2: Put off writing about said best birthday for 3 weeks.

It's really starting to piss me off that things both wonderful and awful are passing by without me at least making some kind of note about them here. I guess I'm just rusty enough at even writing that I keep feeling like I need to give myself the time and space to get it all out properly. But of course then it never happens. Having a blog kind of half-on like this is pretty sad so who knows, maybe I'll just put an end to the thing, but at least I've gotten this event down. So there.