Canada Day Weekend

Now that the weekend is over, we've finally had a chance to catch our collective breathes. Things started at around 5:00 pm Friday evening, and didn't really stop until late afternoon on Monday.

Aside from my house warming party, this is the first genuine full-fledged party that I've thrown at my place in years. That was the downside of the cottage (and certainly the downside of my in-city living arrangements) was that the amount of entertaining that I could do was limited to a small group of people.

And believe me, I missed entertaining.

I think I picked it up from my grandmother. She used to have us over for Sunday dinner, back when I was in university. I used to have to warn my friends to not have too much to eat during the first round, as there was always more and more food to be had. Grammy felt that she hadn't succeeded unless, when you walked out her front door, you waddled.

Lacking the requisite living space and maturity for dinner parties, I elected to focus my activities on more alcohol-related activities. The parties started small, but it wasn't long before they started to get crazier and crazier, and run later and later.

One of the traditions that we used to have for these parties was the infamous jug of Party Juice. For Party Juice, we would take an empty water cooler bottle, and fill it up with normal juice. We'd then proceed to add somewhere between 3 and 5 bottles of alcohol. We capped it off by putting a small hand pump on top of the bottle.

The result was an 18L jug of mixed drink.

Whatever wasn't drunk by the end of the night was stored in whatever containers we had on hand, and consumed as soon as possible thereafter. There was no particular motivation for that decision, but it seemed reasonable. We didn't know just how reasonable until the Bourbon bottle incident.

After one particularly raucous party, we ended up with too little room in the fridge to store all of the Party Juice. Inventive as we were, my housemate Chris and I elected to put what little Party Juice remained in a recently-emptied Bourbon bottle, which we put into Chris' closet and promptly forgot about.

Roughly a week later, Chris and I were going about our business when we heard a sudden *POP* *THWACK* and *CRACK*, which we rushed to investigate, only to be greeted by the smell of yeast and sour juice. As it turned out, the Party Juice had continued to ferment while it was in the Bourbon bottle, and the resultant pressure was too much for the cork to bear. Ergo, the cork was shot into the ceiling, and landed hard back on the floor once gravity won out.

We did what any pair of young men would do in similar circumstances. We drank our double-fermented, freshly carbonated mixture. As far as I can tell, neither of us went blind as a result.

In any event, this weekend saw not just one, but two parties, one of which was completely impromptu. The first lasted until roughly four in the morning, while the second lasted until about three. It was a good feeling, and I hope to be able to do something similar again in the near future.

There's more to this story (ie. what happened at the parties, and the rest of the weekend), but I've written enough for one day. The rest should be up in another day or so.