Watershed Christmas Party 2009

This year Watershed decided to have their holiday party at the Portland office... they

couldn’t have picked a worse day to do so! The weather heading out of Corvallis was the worst I’ve seen since moving here. There was freezing rain and we saw 2 flipped cars and many off the road just on 34 getting to I-5 on the way out of town. Emily and I provided a ride up for German and Curtis and German mentioned that she was happy to be with me in 4x4 as I am from the east and am used to driving in crappy conditions. Doug almost turned around on the way out of town. Luckily people had left earlier before the rain but if we had waited another 30 minutes we may not have made it out either. Later in the night Aaron texted me that there was a quarter inch of ice on everything in Corvallis and the bus system had shut down... glad we made it out.

Portland was dry and the driving north of Salem turned out to be just fine. We got to the party around 8:30 which wasn’t bad for leaving Corvallis at 6:30. People from the Portland office were already well into the kegs and wine bottles that were provided but there was still a lot of food from the cajun-themed party left so we all dug into it. I’m usually not

big into spicy cajun food but it was all pretty good. The Portland office was really amazing and very trendy complete with bike racks, a chalkboard pipe people could write on and a huge conference room with bench seating that we all got our picture in. Everyone put on name tags but then as the night rolled on they got switched among people and everyone had a hard time remembering names... maybe next year we can think of something better to help remember everyone by.

Danielle seemed to be in a funk and needing some hard alcohol so her Emily, Doug, and I took a stroll down the street to a restaurant where we got some booze and I got a yummy Guiness. It was refreshing to leave the chaotic party briefly. On the way back some really

young kids approached us hammered. I’m not going to write what went down but one of their drunk buddies was getting a little agro and I thought I was going to have to knock a 16yr old kid onto the ground, but thankfully Danielle produced the office key and

we went inside instead leaving the kids to drag their obnoxious buddy away. Back at the party everyone was having a good time and we noticed a slide show of photos where I was surprised to see photos from our backyard that someone had apparently jacked off my flickr account or facebook account... Alexa.... Then came Karoake where Alexa and Cassie sang “Baby got Back” much to the amusement of everyone in the room. One of the office cubicles got

TP’d and other shinanigans were going down including Orienne playing the bagpipes at one point!

Soon it became time to leave so Emily and I grabbed our bags that Doug had driven up for us and headed back to the hotel room. To our surprise we burst in the door to find Amanda sleeping soundly. Oh well.. from there it was on to Kells for some drinks with Danielle, Scott, Colin, Mischa, Kevin and Alexa.

After Kells Kevin dragged us to a Skeevy joint... when I say “skeevy” I bet you can guess what kind of a joint it was. Emily had never been to one and I personally hate them but Kevin was excited so we went for just a beer. We were in there about 30 minutes before they closed the place down and made it back to our hotel room by around 2:45am where the girls had kicked all the guys into their room and took one for themselves. When I say Kevin was drunk that is an understatement. He was so wound up and dancing for another 10 minutes when we got back... then he and

Scott headed back to the Portland office to grab leftovers for us at 3am!

After a noise complaint later we all managed to calm down and finally hit the sack (kevin and I sharing a bed much to the other’s amusement).

In the morning us guys were awoken with headaches by loud thumping on the walls... yup, it had to be Danielle. It was about 9:30am and we had about 5 hours of sleep. Kevin rolled over and announced he was actually still drunk he thought. We all took quick showers as the room smelled terrible and we wanted

breakfast asap. After a little confusion driving we all ended up at a breakfast joint where they had a bloody mary bar. The housemates didn’t partake in any bloody mary’s but Colin,

MIscha, Scott & Danielle certainly did and they looked great ( I had a couple pickled asparagus stalks though!). I was debating on whether to go skiing or not because it would be the last time I could before Christmas but after waiting nearly a friggin’ hour for our food and then filling up my stomach felt terrible and Emily and I decided to bag it and head back to Corvallis where we spent the rest of the afternoon chillin’ on the couch recovering from one hell of a party!