Office Party

The night started off innocently enough, with 2 coolers full of enough beer to drown a boat load of sailors. You know how office parties start, slow and boring, mainly because nobody has had enough to drink to loosen them up, and because nobody really knew each other. A few drinks later, and we managed to get a poker game going (yes, I really did bring chips and cards to an office Christmas party, deal with it).

Here's the scene: Since a small group had already landed the kitchen table with a crazy variation of Chinese checkers, we were left to use our oversized cerebral cortices to come up with another place. "Oh, look outside on the porch, there's a table there." "Brilliant," I think, because it's only about 45 degrees outside, threatening rain and a frigid breeze that's enough to take the edge off any reselmbance of warmth we were trying to keep.

But don't worry, there's a chiminea that'll keep us all warm. Riiiiiiiiiight. After about 20 minutes of hassle, mainly me soaking every thing else but the logs full of lighter fluid, I got the sucker burning.* I seem to remember them putting out more heat that that sucker managed to put out. It was fine, as long as you were about 2 inches away from it. Oh well. Oh yeah, since we were in a modified covered porch, just about all of the smoke blew right on us. Nothing that a ceiling fan set a mach 10 couldn't fix. Great, now we have cold, a threat of rain, smoke, and gail force winds. But I digress.

So, with the fire burning, we managed to play what some people would call Texas hold 'em. I managed to be the first one out of our little tourney (4 players) by having my hammer (72os) and my A-Rod (Q8os) repeatedly torn apart, with the A-Rod failing me to knock me out of the tourney.

We were honored to have Lil N (not to be confused with Lil Kim) appoint herself as "all-time quaterback", I mean dealer, which was nice because I don't think my frostbitten fingers would have managed. Thanks for dealing and for the ride back home.

Keep on keepin' on.

* I must confess that I was using citronella juice to start this fire per the request of the home owner. I ended up breaking the bottle with my sheer, unadulterated strength and shot the fluid all over the place, including me. Nice, real nice. Stick a fork in me 'cause I'm toast.