happy bday! love, your favorite aardvark

It is a lovely act of kindness when your coworkers remember your birthday. When they hand you a deep-fried and glaze covered donut for breakfast and praise all that is you...for inside of 5 minutes YOU are the king of the cubicles!...the fact that your crown is courtesy of Burger King only makes it more awesome! With the obligatory donut ritual checked off the to-do list, your co-workers return to their desks. But 2pm Lunch Crewers know, the fun doesn't end there! Oh no....secret surprise lunches are planned, decoy traps are laid, decorations are forged by fluorescent light using only the finest clip art available! True, these efforts are made on behalf of your birthday just as much as they are out of self-serving aims to eat Chipotle and play paper football. But what happens when, rightly so, the 2pm hour becomes the highlight of your birthday? Leaving any other attempts by family, friends, or aardvarks to pale in comparison? This year...and by year we mean starting in May...the 2pm Lunch Crew will take a new approach...birthdays will never be the same...and your beloved family and friends, and even a freaking aardvark will receive an instant A+ for their efforts...because for 60minutes of your birthday, from 2pm to 3pm the celebration will revolve around all those things which you DESPISE. For the "global warming is a fraud" fanatic, a "go-green" party...for the tried and true Italian (and by Italian I mean still visits family in Italy)...pasta from Pizza Hut (the finest in Italian cuisine!)...more themes to follow. But take a cue from the 2pm Lunch Crew and do your family, friends, and < if you don't know any aardvarks insert your animal of choice here > a favor and celebrate your most hated things in life at lunch...it will make that store bought cake and bouquet of wilted flowers look a whole lot better when you get home!

to curl, or not to curl

Though the lunch crew entered the Winter Olympic season divided (those with intense opening-ceremony-party-planning spirit vs. those with better things to do), the last week has been devoted to the mysterious and elusively-scored game of curling. For those of you as unfamiliar with the sport as we, curling is the fast-paced and high-adrenaline sport, nay, art, of stone sliding. The timeless game was invented by Norwegian cave dwellers shortly following the division of Pangaea and has remained to this day in it's pure unadulterated form. Stones are to be slid down a lane of ice, propelled by the yelling of innuendous phrases. While stones have no finite destination, they do travel in the utmost cleanliness, as two players must sweep all debris from the stone's way. This prevents the rare stones from being scratched, gave cave-wives the opportunity to break in their new brooms, and ensured the safe retrieval of the stone since the sweeper would be present when the stone eventually stopped. Curling is the eldest child of stone throwing sports, closely followed by shot-put; the family favorite, bowling, with it's structured scoring system and snazzy pins, has always garnered the most attention, often leaving curling bitter and lonely....two character traits that are often exemplified by curling players.