Company Party

[amberica]

We had our annual "Holiday Party" this past weekend. It was RIDICULOUSLY huge - we have 470 employees at this location, plus their spouses/significant others... That's a big party, even if not everyone came. I was kind of nervous about being in such a crowd with all that free booze flowing. I don't like crowds and I don't like drunks and I get especially uncomfortable around crowds of drunk co-workers and superiors and mostly strangers all dressed up to the 9s. So it was tough.

There was a WONDERFUL dinner though, so that was nice. We ate very well. It was a buffet with the following:


Appetizers
Walleye Fingers w/ Red Pepper Remoulade
International Cheese Assortment
Bruschetta
Steak Crostini with Balsamic Syrup
Spanikopita

Dinner Buffet
Butternut Squash Soup
Mixed Greens - Cucumber, Tomato, Selections of Dressings
Seafood Pasta
Vegetable Napoleon
Vegetable Curry
Roasted Rosemary-Garlic Red Potatoes
Chipotle Roasted Yams
Roasted Tenderloin of Beef with Merlot Glaze - carving station
Honey Mustard Glazed Ham - carving station
Grilled Salmon with Lobster Cream Sauce
Chicken Merlot with Portobello mushrooms and red onion relish in Merlot sauce

Desserts
Zebra Cake
Turtle Cheesecake
Key Lime Island Pie
Chocolate Nirvana


After dinner, there was a comedienne from Comedy Central. She wasn't that great. Then we had casino games. Jon and I spent a couple hours at the Texas Hold 'Em tables and I actually did pretty good for once. Of course, it was just a few people who didn't know how to play too well, and I got a couple lucky hands, so that made a difference.

They gave us 2 coupons each to buy chips, and each coupon bought $1000 worth of chips. Then, for every $1000 you won, you could trade in your chips for a raffle ticket! (Or, if you don't like gaming, you could just trade in your coupons for 1 raffle ticket each.) Plus everyone got 1 free raffle ticket, too. We put our free tickets in the raffle and then played until I won 3 more, so that was pretty good. Jon lost all his chips. :( The raffle was this morning and I didn't win anything, but I still had a fun time.

Truth be told, I'm just glad it's over. I really don't like "formal" events, nor do I like crowds or "hanging out" with co-workers. It was kind of stressful, but I didn't realize just how much stress I was feeling until we were driving back home and I felt myself finally relaxing. It's so funny, because I think the purpose of these things is to "relax," but I just don't think that makes sense.

Oh well. I had a nice time at Jon's company party, with only about 28 people present. Maybe I'll get lucky next year and his will be scheduled on the same night as mine so I don't have to go to mine. ;)

Comments

[imogen-blue.livejournal.com]

what is turtle cheesecake?

i hate work activities. i don't like drunk people either.
they make me nervous & edgy.

[amberica.livejournal.com]

Mmm, turtle cheesecake....

I guess first I should explain what a "turtle" is - in the candy sense. Turtle candies are basically just a small cluster of pecans and caramel covered in chocolate - they look kind of like lumpy little turtles. I think they are kind of old-fashioned, the kind of candy you can get in a fancy candy shop, but not mass-produced like Hershey's bars.

So you bake a cheesecake (do they have cheesecake in your neck of the woods? I might have a harder time explaining that. It involves a lot of cream cheese and sugar... often served with cherries on top), but you use chocolate cookie crumbs for the crust, and then you drizzle caramel and chocolate all over it and sprinkle it with pecans, and that is a turtle cheesecake! Mmmm, so rich! Tastes perfect with some good black coffee.

[imogen-blue.livejournal.com]

we have cheesecake - but not so much the baked ones, mostly the set ones & they use digestive biscuits for the base. i haven't seen a cheesecake here with cherries on top. i love the lemon cheesecakes.
but the turtle cheesecake sounds YUM!!!!

of all the nuts pecans are supposed to be most good for you... do you think that balances out all the fats & sugars?? :)

worst nuts are peanuts which aren't really a nut.

oh hey! you predicted rightly last year - everyone is hung up on trans fats now. every second current affairs commercial is doing a story on trans fats. lame.
they always lock onto symptons, but never the cause.

[mouse-gerald.livejournal.com]

I've always hated that kind of thing. At Amex it was easy enough to avoid the annual company gala, but smaller department affairs were harder to dodge. Fortunately they're usually held at bars, or someplace where booze flows freely, so I've got a "get out of jail free" card if I just let my boss know I'm in recovery and I'm not comfortable around alcohol. That's not true (the part about not being comfortable, it doesn't really bother me much), but it's better than saying "Bad enough I have to mingle with these people on your time, I'm certainly not doing it on mine."