....obligatory photos of everyone jumping at the beach! Yay! Take One: Gurj, Scott and Amanda have amazing form in this pic. Sarah, however, failed to achieve lift off.
Later that night a whole bunch of us went to Amanda's for birthday treats and a game of Trivial Pursuit. Everyone was so tired from being out in the sun all day (well, except for Siege of course) and kept falling asleep!
July 26th is Amanda's birthday (and Leigh's too!). On Saturday morning, I rode my bike down to Battery Park to meet up with the birthday girl for a birthday bike ride up the West Side!
We invited a bunch of people to come over to our place to eat snacks, play video games and then watch the fireworks. Amanda arrived around 10, looking summer-tastic!
This picture is great in so many different ways. My favorite part about this picture is looking at Cynthia and Amanda and realizing that they totally remind me of...
...Vin and Josh from pretty much every photo I have of them in college. Here's a pic of Vin and Josh from 1998 for comparison's sake.
Then a couple songs later, Meredith, KT and Siege joined the party and we all nerded out together. Just cuz you're getting married doesn't mean you gotta grow up or anything! Thanks to everyone for keeping the surprise a secret and for coming out to help me surprise Meredith! It meant so much to have so many people we love be there to share that huge moment in our lives!
Indoor grilling in June in a NYC-sized apartment = 1,000 degrees Farenheit. Meredith was like "It's so hot in here, let's go up on to the roof" and everyone had to keep making up excuses about why we were staying in the roasting-hot apartment.
On Sunday morning I told Meredith I was having brunch with some former co-workers that were in town visiting, but I was really secretly meeting up with Amanda, Scott and Leigh to go shopping FOR AN ENGAGEMENT RING! Oh, snap!
That's right! After four years of dating, I decided that I was going to surprise Meredith and ask her to marry me at Sarah Lewitinn's Memorial Day BBQ; it was the fourth anniversary of the very same party that Meredith asked me out on our first date in 2004!
At first we didn't think doing body shots would be that big of a deal. Everyone's done them before right? But what you forget to realize is that usually when anyone does a body shot - it's usually in the back of some dark, shitty crowded bar and you're wasted and everyone is cheering you on. Doing body shots in the middle of a TACO JOINT that people are having lunch at, in the middle of the afternoon, while being STONE-COLD SOBER brings a whole new level of ass-cringing embarrassment to an already embarrassing endeavor!
"Team member doing something dirty to the owner of Urban Rustic (Luis)." 25 POINTS! Hahah. I love how the "something dirty" we came up with was to have Amanda and Scott "peek" up his apron while he's on a slider ladder. (PS - is that the lead singer of Soul Asylum in the background?)
Five people on a love seat! Awwww. After I took this photo, I put my camera down somewhere and then couldn't find it! I looked and looked, but it totally had disappeared! A couple of minutes later, I returned from getting another drink in the kitchen and it turned up. I turned the camera on...
Major controversy erupted when someone drew a "all teams compete" card and each team had to select a member to try to get their teammates to guess the clue "Jewish." Here's Meredith holding up the winning drawing, in front of her all-Jewish team.
Naughty Girls (Need Love Too) by Samantha Foxx. (Which is exactly the kind of song you always want to sing at karaoke but never get to do until you're faced with a totally empty room and you can try out all sorts of new songs!).
...we walked up to 2nd on 2nd so that we could continue singing karaoke! Check out our posse totally digging into the books and furiously jotting down songs. Hahaha.
After filling our gullets with treats and booze, someone realized that we were just a few short blocks away from Winnie's! Which is the best karaoke bar in Chinatown (where all the songs are still on LASER DISC)! Check out the rocking troupe we had. Hahaha.
...so a bunch of us piled into the elevator and decided to walk a couple more blocks downtown to check out some other PR-event kind of party that someone else knew about.
Yay, it's November! On Friday night, we went to see Fiasco play a show at Crash Mansion. Crash Mansion has one of the best sounding rooms in downtown NYC, but the crowd there is always a little...
