On Friday afternoon, I drove to the city (in afternoon rush hour traffic). Grace (who actually just ended up staying at the house Wednesday and Friday since I was able to take care of the dogs myself on Thursday) just came in after work, so she caught me on camera with all of my stuff.
I did say before that I wasn't sure if I was going to get a good workout. I even did the Barre 3 Fit class in the morning just in case the boxing didn't do anything for me. I actually expected the class to be cardio kickboxing, but Nicole told me before I left that it was real boxing. We'd have to wrap our hands and use boxing gloves.
I was really excited, because I took Krav Maga classes when I was in high school. I still have my wraps and gloves, but I realized that I forgot them when I got on the highway. Nicole told me that I could borrow them from the club, anyway.
So, as it turned out, the class kicked my butt.
I'm bad at boxing, by the way. After a year plus of Krav Maga, I can't even remember how to punch properly! I still had a lot of fun.
I also got to try the class for free! They didn't charge me a cent for an hour-long class or using their wraps and gloves.
Here was the issue: Irene invited about 200 people to her party on Saturday night, obviously not knowing that we were in the process of planning her surprise party for Friday night. After spending a greater part of the morning talking to Luiz and my friends Andi and Goda, we decided that we had to let everybody know about Friday night WITHOUT Irene knowing about it.
I copied and pasted the names of the people she invited into a Word document and divided it up into four parts for me, Luiz, Andi and Goda. We were then supposed to send an individual message on Facebook to each person.
Around 5 pm, we ran into another problem: Facebook doesn't like it when you send too many individual messages. After 25 messages, I got an alert telling me that I could have been harassing other people and I was banned from messaging for a few hours to several days. Huge bummer. It all ended up okay, because we managed to get their e-mail addresses. Then, Andi sent out a mass e-mail.
All was still not well, because Irene told me on the phone that she didn't want to go out on Friday night. She's taking four classes online, so she wanted to use the night to study. Andi and Goda told me that I needed to come up with an elaborate lie to change her mind, so I told her that I couldn't go out on Saturday night. I said that my parent's plane got cancelled, and they couldn't reschedule until Sunday morning. I told her that Grace was not able to stay with the dogs another night, so I had to watch them. I told her how much I really wanted to be part of her birthday celebration, and I begged her to come out for a little while. She ate up every word, and she agreed to come out Friday night for a girl's night.
It all worked out in the end. Irene met us at Nicole's apartment at 10:30 (Luiz dropped her off and said that he was going out with some of his friends), and we took a cab over to Public House in River North. Andi met us at the door with a box for Irene containing a red heart necklace and a card. The card said some funny things like the fact that I was a liar and that Luiz was the best and to find the red balloons. Sure enough, there was a whole party of party of people by a few red balloons.
She was so surprised!
Andi also cheered me up by taking me to the Photo Booth downstairs. There were three other photos, but I think this was the most flattering/appropriate. Man, those things would be fun to have at my wedding!