Holiday party

We went to my company holiday party tonight. You can see pictures of Ian and I before we left for the party here. Aren't my shoes awesome? My feet hurt quite a lot by the time we were done, though. Still, they look fantastic :) I also spent quite a bit of time on my makeup - I'm quite happy with the way it turned out, too. I felt very pretty, and I think I looked pretty, too.

The party was held at RIM Park instead of Bingemans, where it was held last year. There were two main giant rooms where tables were set up. One was a gymnasium with a gym floor and the other was a fieldhouse with a plywood floor. There were a number of smaller rooms upstairs as well. They were nicer than the big rooms, but our friends were in the fieldhouse. That was fine; the plywood was easier to walk on than the gym floor :)

One thing that I especially liked about the venue this year was that the tables were round and set up for eight people and there was space to walk around the tables. Last year, there were long rows of tables and the chairs were very close together. If you wanted to get up, you disturbed 15 people to get out, so having space to walk this year was great. The other thing that I liked about this venue was that there was slightly more network coverage than at the venue last year, so I could more easily find my friends.

The dinner started about a half-hour late. Bingemans still catered the dinner. Unfortunately, that meant that the food was made over at Bingemans and brought to the site so it was a little less tasty than last year. The desserts were ok. Both of us ate too much, of course :)

After dinner there were the usual speeches exhorting the company's success over the last year (yes, we were very successful). The tables near us played some drinking games; whenever any of our main products were named, they took a drink. I don't know how many complimentary bottles of wine they ended up going through (there are a lot of products, and many of them were mentioned at least once), but it was a lot. The company did provide a taxi to anyone who wanted one; as long as the person can legibly write their name on the chit, they could have a free cab ride, and the taxis started showing up at the door at 10pm. Every employee attending also had to sign a waiver saying that they wouldn't drive if they'd been drinking.

When the speeches ended, the dancing began. The music was pretty loud, as usual, and so we decided to leave. As we were on our way out, we met up with some other friends of ours and chatted for a while. I wish I'd known they were there earlier as it would have been nice to sit with them, too - there was room at our table. Oh well, maybe next year. There was one other friend that I'd hoped to see there, but I didn't. I think she was planning on going - I hope she managed to make it, and that she had fun.

Overall, it was fun. The people who knew about the purse thought it looked great and that my shoes were awesome. The people who didn't know about the purse only thought my shoes were awesome :) Some people didn't recognize me because my hair is short and darker than it used to be and I was wearing contacts instead of glasses. I used this to my advantage to not talk to the people I saw that I didn't want to talk to :)