Okay, I had to be hush-hush about it in case someone printed out the Internet and showed my dad. But now the surprise party’s over, its safe to let you in on it.
It went off with only the normal number of hitches. We were going to have it at the Lion’s Club, which would be easy to setup and easy to surprise my dad. But that didn’t work out because of some date conflicts. Then we were going to have it in the back yard at the house. This presented some surprising difficulties (so to speak), but seemed reasonable enough until it started to look like rain.
Plan three was to have the party in the barn. This actually worked out pretty well. Aaron started getting it cleaned out on Friday and the rest of us worked on it Saturday morning while Mom and my niece Brittney kept dad busy. Christina was at my grandma’s house just up the road getting, as it turned out, ridiculously too much food ready.
We managed to sneak 60 people into the barn without Dad noticing thanks to a combination of Cardinal Baseball, a really loud TV and opportune napping. Dad was quite surprised when he got to the barn and a few hours later he said to me, “You know, we can rent the Lions Club for half price?”