My Pirate Parrrrrrty

This weekend I had my birthday party. It took me forever to think of what I wanted to do for my birthday, because I'm not a fan of parties where people just come over, and there's music playing, and you just sit around and mingle. I finally decided I wanted to have an old-school birthday party like the ones I had when I was a kid, and I planned to play the string game and have a treasure hunt. This inspired me to make pirate-themed invitations, and somehow the whole party turned into a pirate party. We had Captain Jack Sparrow plates and napkins, little treasure chests filled with candy, gold coins, eye patches, and swords. We hung pirate flags on the wall and had a big pirate ship steering wheel (is there a more technical term for that?) hung on the door. It rocked.

A couple of hours beforehand, my roommates and I set up the string game. We cut 14 pieces of yarn and wound each one around the living room and kitchen--around table legs, between chair spokes, through the cabinet door handles, and around and around, so each person playing the game has to unwind one strand to find the treasure at the end. It takes a couple of hours to tie that much yarn all around the room. Once we had about 11 set up, I stood in the living room, and Duchess stood in the kitchen, and we just threw the string ends back and forth to each other, because it was too hard to maneuver through the maze. Much giggling ensued. The girls upstairs let us use their apt to gather people at the beginning of the party since ours was full of yarn. When I walked in, the room was full of my favorite people! I was so excited! ( I say that a lot, but it really did fill my heart with joy to see all the people that had showed up for me. I love my friends!)

Once everyone was gathered, I announced that evil pirates were after some treasure that had been hidden in our complex, and the only way to stop them was for us to find it first. We led everyone downstairs and opened the door to the room full of yarn. One person who'd played it with us before took one look inside and said, "Oh no!" Heheh. I was pleasantly surprised by what good sports they all were. Some people might have thought it was beneath them to play such childish games, but everyone acted like they were having fun. The Canadian, who had one of the shorter strands and therefore finished before everyone else, was watching Aunt Giraffe try to unwind her string from the living room into the kitchen. She asked him to hold her pencil and then hand it back to her once she'd climbed over the counter. While she was trying to get across, The Canadian unwound a bunch of the string she'd already wrapped around the pencil and wove it in and out between B's skiis. It took about 1.5 seconds for Aunt Giraffe to realize what he'd done, not least because he looked TOTALLY guilty when she confronted him about it. It was hilarious.

At the end of each person's string was a little pirate symbol, designating what group he or she was in for the treasure hunt. I joined the treasure map group. I should probably mention that the weather that morning had been sunny and beautiful, but by the evening, it was dark, cold, and snowing. No one was excited about going outside in the freezing wind, but they were troopers anyway. Like I said--I have great friends. Our first clue led us to the dumpster on the boys' side of the complex, where we found the next clue immediately. For the next clue, we were supposed to complete a word search, then take the certain designated letters and use them to fill in the blanks of the clue at the bottom. However, The Canadian just looked at the clue and figured it out with the letters missing, so it took no time at all. Our final clue led us to the trees behind the complex, and it was really hard to see back there in the dark. We found a clue, but it didn't have our treasure map symbol on it. I was pretty sure we were in the right spot, so I called B to verify. She said we were, so we grabbed our treasure and headed back to my apt to wait for the other groups.

Each group's "treasure" was a different kind of topping for cheesecake, so once everyone was back, we pulled out the cheesecake, and everyone went to town on it. It ended up being a wonderful evening, and I was delighted by the people that came and how much fun we had.