Anything worth doing is worth doing again. I present the following for your amusement. Many of you are in these pictures, but (to a first approximation) none of you are with the right boyfriends or girlfriends. Except Eric and Lindsey, God bless ’em. Anyway, what follows is more or less the text of the original photodocumentation of this party from spring of 2000. Back then, there were no Flickr; we rolled our own and we liked it, so these were on the unfortunately defunct NoGators.com site. Since a server crash took it down, they’ve been tragically offline . . . until now!

In Which We Review Photo-Graphs Taken at Birthday Festivities in March, 2000.

Some time ago, I turned 30. (March, 2000.)

What follows is something like a photographic record. These shots were taken by my brother, who was apparently flummoxed slightly by his new camera; they’re a bit hot in places. Additionally, the photolab transfer to lo-res .jpg files didn’t do them any favors. Even so, however, here they are.

They are in no particular order. Though it should be rather clear which are early and which are drunker (er, later) in in the evening.

• Part the First: In which general party groups are documented, some better than others.
• Part the Second: In which events in the back yard are investigated, and a lapse in judgement is forever preserved in kodachrome.
• Part the Third: In which things are set afire and carried forth in shopping carts, much to the consternation of neighbors and miscellaneous civic support organizations

UPDATE – 2003

Yeah, now I’m even older, but in reformatting these pages for use on the new server, it occurs to me that a monstrous number of these pictures are, well, waaaay out of date. Certain people have gently pointed out that, well, their sister is my girlfriend now, and she even lives with me and stuff, and why is that other girl in my 30th birthday pictures?

The answer, gentle reader, is that Erin wasn’t even AT my 30th birthday party. So there. I mean, there was an Erin, but not THE Erin.

Also, I intend to keep these pictures up long enough for them to be embarrassing to certain children whose parents are shown here (when you’re old enough to read the Internet, kids, give Uncle Chet a call and he’ll tell you stories about your parents; Eva, Matilde, and Hadley, I’m talking to YOU).

UPDATE AGAIN – 2010

Now I’m even older than I was when I commented in 2003, but I’m not sure I’ll cop to wiser. Anyway, these pix have been forgotten for years, but looking at ’em now made me smile enough that I wanted to put them back online. But the bit about your kids calling me for an explanation in a few years? That’s still TOTALLY on, except now we have to add Gwen, Carl, and Layla to the list.

I’m a lucky, lucky boy. Cheers, friends.