ThePuddingStore 4th Anniversary Company Picnic!
Yes, there were fabulous adventures to be had at this years anniversary spectacular, with fun events, excellent company, and a crapload of pictures taken. With that many pictures, it'd be realyl easy to make an article with pictures... Hey! That's what I'm doing right now! Crazy! Well, with all the fun, events, and people, the most important part of any PS anniverary is....
... lots of pudding, of course! Pudding was given to the winners of each of the events, so that there was an actual reason to run. Most of us are out of shape, so running for nothing? Not so good. Running for dessert? Yer on! So yeah, we got around 40 cups of pudding, including some new/weird "Cottan Candy" and "BubbleGum" flavours... craziness.
For a while at the field (the ball field next to the County Arena in Coxheath) there was just me and Erin, sitting around and basically trying to figure out the best way to stack that pudding seen above. Eventually, people started trickling in. And since they were the first 4, they get their pictures put up on the internet - crazy how these things work out, eh?
Yep, there's Bonnie and Ben, long time supporters of "All Things Yellow", and Maureen and Sara-Beth, long time supporters of... t-shirts with cool pictures on them. Radical. Anyways, in a fairly short time, more and more people were showing up, so we really had to do more than just sitting. Hell, you can sit at home! This had to be something special. So we played frisbee.
The difference in skill levels for our game were quite drastic. There were some that were quite good, some that were quite bad. I was really pretty surprised, but oh well - it was a good way to kill time before our first actual event, which was.....
Yes, the illustrious 3 legged race! Staple of company picnics around the world! The teams for this event were (from left to right in that first pic): Bonnie and Lindsay, Ryan and Katie, Doucette and Ben, Erin and Christine, and finally Drew and Dan. The winners, as it fairly obvious by those pictures, were Drew and Ben. Kudos gents.
Here they are enjoying the rewards for their vast efforts - fine cups of freshly purchased pudding. On a sidenote about this event - it's not so much shocking that Drew and Dan won, that Erin and Christine actually came in second! And Doucette actually ran! But, more on that in the next funtastic event which was...
A rousing game of soccer baseball! Yes, it's not quite soccer, it's not quite baseball, but it's moreso baseball than anything else. This was another of those time-filler-activites, only this one lasted longer, and if you were watching from the street, it looked like we may actually have known what we were doing! Wow! Biggest highlight of this game was Doucette getting an infield homerun. Yes, Kris Doucette actually ran, quite quickly, all the way around the diamond. You had to see it to believe it folks. The game was rather one sided by my team (cuz we rock). I won't say the actual score for the hopes of sparing feelings, but it was somewhere in the ballpark ("ballpark"... I'm hilarious.) of 21-3. Something like that anyways. Go team!
After that game, since we're all horribly out of shape, we had to sit down for a while. So, why not take that opportunity to eat lunch? Made sense to us, so we did so. During this little period, the clan D'Orsay showed up, thus the Cheat will be showing up in a LOT more pictures in this article. Cute pictures. Pictures that will make you say, "Aww! That's so friggin' cute!" Yeah, it's just that cute. "Cute" shows up a lot in this paragraph. Cute cute cure.
The next event of the day was yet another staple of the company picnic: the egg-on-a-spoon race! Wee! This was one of the major highlight of the day, at least for me. I'm not sure why, but I really had a lot of fun with this one, and I was just the guy taking pictures/being the finish line. I don't remember the teams that were made for this one (it was 3 people per team, and there were lots more people here by then - about 20 or so), so I forget. Sue me. You can see them in the picture anyways. This event was a LOT closer than the 3 legged race, so maybe that's why it was so fun. The surpirse winners though were... Team D'Dorsay! And they had 4 people! And one of them is only like 2 feet tall! Wowzers!
To the victors go the spoils. That's Andrew there from Team D'Orsay, by the way. He's not REALLY a D'Orsay, but he might as well be. Also, the Cheat + pudding = more cute! Shocking!
Up next was another highlight of the day: Red Rover. The game started with everyone against "Team Fat," which consisted of Christian, Doucette, Clayton, Amy, and Andrew. I was supposed to be there, but I was taking pictures. Also, I'm not all that fat. So, I just joined the other team later. Here we see Erin right before she got crippled running into them. Many people got killed in this game. The worst of which being Katie and Sara-Beth. They got slammed. It was fun! At one point Team Fat came down to me and Andrew, yet somehow we managed to win, with the only loser of the day being Christine, which I suppose makes sense. However, since the point was to give away pudding, this time the loser got the spoils. Damn loser.
The last official event of the day was the "tug of war" which involved everybody. As a result, there is no picture for it, as I even played this one. Wee! The picture seen above is Doucette VS. Ryan. It was sad to watch, for 2 reasons. 1. Ryan is weak, and thus couldn't budge Doucette no matter how much he tried. 2. Doucette is so fat that he can win a tug of war by just standing. Lovely boys. Just lovely.
After all that, chaos kinda ensued, as we still had quite a few eggs left to dipose of. Some were thrown into the field (where they had an amazing life-span... I woulda assumed that thrown eggs would break, but no - took 3 throws with many of them! Gasp!), some were thrown into the street, but the most interesting one was an egg duel between Doucette and Erin.
Eggs (and their handlers) took 10 paces, then charged at one another (or were thrown, whatever). The winner - a hero. The loser - an egg. Technically they both missed, but Erin threw her egg after Doucette, and claimed she won. I don't even think Doucette's egg broke, but whatever. It got rid of the eggs.
Other eggs were drawn on, and put in amusing poses. However, the poses didn't really turn out, so posting them would be pretty useless. No, you had to be there to appreciate the glory that was Sad-Egg, or Batman-Egg, or Fu Man Chu-Egg. Good times.
He we all are at the end of the picnic, enjoying what we all came out to celebrate - the wonderfulness that is pudding. Raising a cup with good cheer and so much etc. The turnout for the whole day was actually much better than I thought it would be, so hurray! Chalk up another victory for thePuddingStore Anniversaries! Oh, but the fun didn't stop here! Oh no my fine feathered friend! There's still at least a few more things to go, and a few more pictures to look at!
On a completely coincidental occurance, our band, Jedi Mind Trick was playing at the boardwalk that very evening! So the picnic moved to there! Only with less of the actual picnic people... but that still counts! So we used it! Brilliant! The set was okay, but because of pudding all over my hands, I kept dropping/breaking drumsticks. Yes, that will be the excuse I will use...
For some odd reason, a bunch of girls showed up during our set dressed in Hawaiian garb. It was most confusing. They were loud, and annoying, and were terrible dancers, so of course we dedicated a song to them. I'm not sure which one, but I DO remember terrible dancing was involved. Dancing for the 4th anniversary of a website. Yes.
NOW that's everything that was done in the run of a fine Saturday afternoon in Cape Breton. And people say there's nothing to do around here. I hope everyone had as much fun as I did with this whole thing, and I really wanna thank everyone who came out and made it really, really fun. Thanks guys! It'll be hard to top this one next year... Perhaps we'll have... I dunno... a church burning. Sounds good to me.