View From the Tenth Level

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Some friends of ours had a first year wedding anniversary. They eloped a year ago, and Dan and I were present to help celebrate afterwards. We were invited to help repeat the fun on their first anniversary, which was really lovely of them.

So, we went out to dinner to the favourite pizza spot (which is where we all celebrated their big day a year ago) and Dan got lost in a diatribe about the uselessness of the show Lost, which he will never live down ever again (because I won’t let him,) and then we went back to their apartment for a glass of wine and some table games. Fortunately, the conversation turned towards how the families were doing and who was now dating – safe topics for the moment.

Sydney has been in a drought for years. However, on this night, the heavens decided to open up – and it came down in buckets. Ironically, the person with the umbrella (the husband part of the duo) got the wettest. Undaunted, though, we headed back to their apartment to have fun with some friendly competition. The skies lit up from time to time with great big cracks of thunder and lightning. It was quite a show.

We got through a card game and were about to start a board game (the premise of this game is to kill all the other players off and run off with Aunt Agatha’s inheritance money), when the power went out. So, we plotted and killed each other off by candlelight – which was fun, considering the theme of the game.

A few singed arm hairs and one six million dollar inheritance later, we were back to card games. After one or two hands of Uno, we decided it was getting late, so we gave hugs all around and headed down the fire stairs to see Security (in the pitch black and emergency lighting) to make sure we could leave the parking garage despite the power being out. No such luck. The manual override was not working. We were locked in.

With our friends. On their wedding anniversary night.

I felt so bad that they weren’t getting any alone time on their special night. I mean, after 10 pm, it’s time to kick the guests out. But they were good-natured about it. Back to card games we went. Uno is especially good to play when the lights are out, since it’s fairly easy to read the cards (even though blue and green sometimes get confused.) Dan won the last hand, so I guess it made up for us giving him a hard time over his pontificating about Lost.

We finally got out around 11:30. I hope they had a great first wedding anniversary - with and without us.

posted by Melanie O. at 2:41 PM -

2 Comments:

At 12:00 AM, Anonymous said…

Thank you for a lovely write up. It was a great way to spend the anniversary... and the power cut just made it a bit more memorable. Nobody will forget Dan's Lost rant in a hurry!
At 3:16 PM, Melanie O. said…

ha ha! No one will let Dan live that down. (Let's be sure never to mention the L-O-S-T word again, though, so he can't get started on it again.) ;-)