Chief Celebrations 2009: Project Blue Party

Early into the month and we thought, "Great, let's start planning for the Chief's birthday early."

Then we had a look at the calender and went, "Shit, forgot we're going Genting on the birthday weekend! Need to hold it much earlier!"

Thus we hurriedly started sending out the invites, hastily made using the Comic Touch and HiCard Suite apps for the iPod Touch. And came up with something like this:

This is the front cover for all invites (except that instead of a hand-art peacock it was a picture of the Chief)...

This one for the bloggers...

Then there's one more for the guys (TTDIans? Taman Tun-ites?)...

As last year we only managed cake and drinks with the bloggers, this year we've decided to have a dinner party. We certainly cannot remember what made us choose Basil Thai Nudle Bar ofr the venue, save that we wanted it to be somewhere out of the city centre due to after-work traffic. Friday night in Bangsar seemed like a probably spot (not to mention that it was near enough for us to set up the party!).

And so, we had three birthday party projects to juggle. Firstly, Project Blue Party.

We actually made a few trips to Bangsar Village to get this ready!

There was the concern about the venue - we've dined at Basil before and remember that they didn't have tables set out for 15 or more people. Which, based on our initial emailing list, was the estimate number of guests should everyone confirm their attendance.

After confirming that they would have the space for 18 confirmed guests, we preordered the food - instead of everyone ordering a la carte dishes, we chose an easy menu to feed everyone, also so that they could prepare it all beforehand, ready to serve once everyone was settled in.

Then we somehow got it into our head that we wanted decorations, and remembering Balloons & Bouquets was nearby, we headed there to enquire regarding their prices for helium balloons. While in the store we sort of wandered a bit and started looking around at party favours such as horns and whistles and clappers and all sorts of noisemakers, save poppers - we didn't want to shock people in a restaurant when a popper goes off.

Anyways, we resisted the urge to turn the dinner party into somewhat like a kiddy garden party, complete with paper hats and such and just stuck to balloons. Instructions was that the helium balloons to be in two shades of blue (initially dark blue and white but then we saw a light blue shade).

We left Basil to manage the table decor, having no time to go get blue paper napkins and confetti for the table.

We'd been to Delicious, Baskin Robbins, Marmalade...couldn't find a satisfactory birthday cake. Bisou's cupcake prices and Haagen Daaz's cakes were out of our budget, unfortunately. So it was rather timely that Adrienz happened to be asking us for feedback regarding the branding for his sis' cupcakes. And so we decided to get cupcakes from Adrienz for the birthday! Small bite-sized cupcakes that wouldn't be too filling after dinner, with directions to have 'em decorated in blue.

Heh. We told Leggie about having the tables and chairs covered in blue cloth, and he aptly says, "Oh my god. Poisoned in Blue."

Come day of the party, we'd sped off after work to head to Bangsar Village, rush to Basil to meet with Adrienz's sis to collect the cupcakes, rush out to Balloons & Bouquets to get the balloons, walked back through Bangsar Village and to Basil to tie a balloon to each chair (we would very much like to have some tied to the chairs and some floating above the table but we have this rather cynical thought that they might find their way into somebody else's hands), then rush off to fetch the Chief, telling him we were late as we were held back by extra work.

After taking the Chief on a slight goose-chase about Bangsar Village with us claiming that we wanted to shop, we slowly made our way to Basil. Arriving at the entrance of Basil the Chief didn't even suspect a thing because our party table was out of sight, and when the Chief saw the table the Chief initially thought that there was another party going on and wanted to avoid it!

Suffice to say that the surprise work! Once again, thank you everyone for making time to come and celebrate the Chief's birthday together! Let's have plenty more to come!