Saturday was our much-anticipated housewarming party, the first chance we’ve had to show off the new place to the masses. We invited neighbors, friends, and co-workers to the house for twelve hours of karaoke, Dos Equis, yard games, food and visiting, and it was a huge success.

The fact that we are not only in a new house, but a relatively new city and state, made it all the more impressive that over 100 people showed up that day. Prior to June 2011, I had met only two of our guests (Ryan and Heather Bartholic). So I guess I’d consider it pretty amazing the turnout we had. A neighbor commented that “it took the new guy to finally get us all together for the first time.” Many neighbors have lived there for years and had never seen the backyard of our house and had long heard stories of how nice it was, and were interested to finally check it out for the first time.

Lauren had a very good showing from her Whole Foods co-workers, who mostly showed up relatively early on and left early. My co-workers came later and stayed later. We took in a great assortment of gifts, mostly alcohol-related. Lauren, if we find ourselves shopping at a liquor store in the next two months, we may have to admit we have a problem, because the garage is absolutely packed with wine, beer, liqueurs and liquors. In addition, our friends the Viviritos constructed a Twins-themed cornhole game for a party gift! The Bartholics supplied us with a 29,000-song karaoke library, and the Megos assisted with shopping and set-up in the morning.

There were no real great stories from the night. I stayed inside and helped lead karaoke, while Lauren mostly stayed outside and kept the non-singers busy. Lauren also prepared a large taco bar that received critical acclaim.

The full gallery of photos taken with my new Samsung Galaxy S3 from the day/night are on Facebook. The quality of the indoor photos at night was poor, but here was my favorite… not even so much just that we had a full dance line in our living room, but the overall randomness of the people dancing together. From left, it’s Ryan Bartholic and his wife Heather, our friend Chris Willoughby, Bart’s volleyball partner Mike Madavane, my co-worker Shenea, the girlfriend of another co-worker, our volleyball teammate Geoff, and our old downstairs neighbor from the apartment Tanner. They were all dancing in unison to Brian Mego’s rendition of “New York, New York.”