happy birthday, bar of mine.

yesterday, the bar i work at turned five years old.

we opened on october 16th, 2001, afer months of renovating, painting, and praying. we were set back by all kinds of things we never could have imagined--read:9/11--but we finally opened. and we're still here, despite the protestations of people all over ann arbor who said our location was bad luck.

lots of stuff has happened in five years (just think--for the first three years i didn't even have a blog!), and it hasn't all been bad, despite what you read here.

it's true--lots of really great stuff has happened, too.
like the time i snuck into the employee bathroom with the owner's wife on a friday night, while she was bartending, and waited while she peed on a stick so we could find out if she was pregnant or not.
she was.

then there was the time that baby girl and i were at home watching t.v. and our boss called to ask us what we were doing that night. we quickly tried to come up with a lie--we didn't want to tell him we were doing nothing, because why else would he be calling unless he needed one of us to come to work? i told him i had a lot of homework to do, and then lied and said he couldn't talk to b.g. because she was in the bathroom. my boss then said "are you sure you can't do that homework some other time? because i have a limo on the way to pick you guys up and take you to the red wings game. oh, and you're each getting $100 of drinking money." that was awesome.

i could go on and on about fun things like that for forever and a day--i'm nothing, if not ramble-icious.

it comes down to this:
this place has made me laugh.
this place has made me cry.
this place has made me so drunk that i couldn't eat for days.
this place has made me a lot of money.

so, happy birthday.
congratulations to you, and your owners, and the four of us left who remember what you looked like before we turned you into a sportsbar.
i'm proud of you, and i love you.

just don't tell anyone, ok?