Had a wonderful 35th birthday today, thanks to my family and a bunch of friends, mostly from the department, with a few others thrown in for good measure.

We moved our usual end-of-the-month game night up a week to have a birthday party at the same time, which was the third event of the week at our house, and the fourth gathering I’d been to this week…

Monday: Small Group at our house.
Tuesday: Arena Survival Party at Brian’s place. Perfect day for it. Got some great pics of the girls.
Wednesday: night off.
Thursday: Après-Party for Jeremy’s wife following dinner at Llywelyn’s (a nice celtic pub within walking distance of our place, with good food, good beer, and good music.)
Tonight: Game Night/Birthday.

Janelle and Brandon (who looks like he could be Terry Storch‘s little brother) joined us. Janelle is our staff Adminstrel/mercenary and goes around filling in for folks on vacation. This week, she’s in HR. Brandon is a web designer for a local advertising agency. Janelle said she loved to play Settlers of Catan, so I invited her and her hubby along (since he’s a geek too). There were enough of us (11 plus the kids) to play two boards of Settlers, which amazingly finished up within minutes of each other. Brian and my wife were the victors.

Before gaming, there was munching. A ridiculous amount of dessert and munchies materialized, in addition to the “official” birthday cake from 3 women and an oven (which is dangerously within walking distance of our house):

(in the background is one of my rapidly-becoming-legendary margaritas, and a bit of Janelle in her KU swag)

Matt was duly impressed by the candle arrangement. This was after all a party attended by geeks. The carrot cake was heavenly. It was the first time we’d outsourced birthday cake production due to Andrea starting full-time work at the church this week and our busy social calendar.

Wait, what? I have a social life? How did that happen? OK, so it’s mostly with other geeks. Demented and sad, but social.

The night was capped off by Brandon, Matt, and Philip playing on Matt’s Wii. Thanks to all my peeps and homies for making it such a fun birthday.