Pete Dudchenko

By Sunday, I actually had a chance to sleep in a bit. Toby, Lopez, Andrea and Michelle all stayed at my one-bedroom apartment Saturday night so there wasn’t much room once we were all up on Sunday. After a slow, head still pounding, start we finally made it back to the house to hang with the rest of the guests that had stayed with my sister and brother-in-law.

Everyone was relaxing and hanging by the pool which was nice since it was yet another beautiful day here in Southern California. A couple of us went to the beach while other went shopping. This was probably the most relaxing day of the whole week long celebration. Most people were flying out the next day so there wasn’t much else going on that night except for me opening gifts that night.

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After about 3 hours of sleep I wake up at approx. 6:30 in the morning to meet a friend to go surfing. I have my entire day planned out at this point including some early morning waves, a massage and a sports club and then, after a quick nap, head over to my sister and brother in law’s to meet up and wait for the limo.

Getting up was very tough and had I not planned to meet someone for surfing, I never would have made it, but I was in the water by 7:30 and it was cold! The sun had not come out and there was a slight drizzle. To top it off the waves were pretty small but even so, I had a great time. Sometimes you only need to ride one wave to make it worth it.

After surfing, I headed home and made some breakfast and the headed over to get my massage. This was pretty sweet. I was really looking forward to this, especially for the chance to just rest a little bit. After the massage, I headed home and tool a small nap and then got ready to head out. Matt came over and he drove to the house.

I think at this point its important to bring up my attempts to motivate my friends. I share a birthday month with Andrea and Toby, two friends from college, and I had been trying to convince them, and others, that we should all meet in Vegas some weekend to celebrate. I had called a bunch of people a couple of weeks ago trying to get something planned and no one had returned my calls in time. This wasn’t a big deal, but I had hopes of seeing everyone.

Why am I telling this story you might ask? Well, as soon as I walked into the backyard of the house, I saw my cousins, my parents, and friends all standing there to surprise me. I was shocked to see how many people had flown in.

The party was catered and had a Mexican theme to it. There was even a Mariachi Band playing for part of the night as well as a bartender. I’m hoping to get pics on my website soon but that depends on how fast I can get them from other people since I didn’t have my camera with me.

By the end of the night everyone was in the pool and a couple pinata’s had been destroyed.

Thanks again to everyone that was there. I hope everyone had as much fun as I did.

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Its the Friday before the actual birthday celebration and I’m already a bit tired. A couple of us have plans to go see The Big Wu which start at 10:30 at Caines. An opening band is performing before this but we decided to hang at the pad until later and have a few drinks. The band was pretty good but their following out here isn’t as big as in the Midwest. We stayed until the last song and then headed home around 2:30.

The setlist is below but it wasn’t complete at time of posting:
Set 1:
Kensington Manor
SPMC
Dogs Dead
Misty Mountain Hop
Minnesota Moon
House of Wu
Dead Flowers
Kangaroo

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Tonight a bunch of us from work headed out to watch a fellow co-worker perform in a radio station’s battle-of-the-bands. I had plans to watch a couple of songs and then head home since I really can’t handle multiple nights out drinking (little did I know) but of course we ended up staying until all the bands performed and then (of course) we had to head out to another bar for more drinks.

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So I’m actually writing this on the 17th but I wanted to keep the days straight since haven’t gotten much sleep and a lot happened. At this point, my birthday is five days away and all I know is that a couple friends/family members are meeting at my sisters this Saturday to rent a limo and go to Benihanna for dinner and then downtown for drinks. Tonight is a Wednesday and I have a date which involves dinner and a comedy club. This isn’t really part of my birthday but the comedy club was so bad that we ended up drinking more than planned in hopes of making the comics funnier. It failed. I didn’t think at the time that a late Wednesday night would be that big of a deal but this is really the start of the week long event I’m calling the “Birthday Bender.”

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I voted yesterday. Had I not been so lazy, I could have voted without ever leaving my place. A couple of weeks back I received this flyer about absentee ballots and that I can just use that to vote from home and mail my ballot in. I did vote from home but I didn’t get it done in time to have the ballot received by Election Day so I had to drop it off around the corner. The thing in San Diego that I noticed is the number of Propositions that exist. I don’t remember that living in Chicago but I must have voted on at least 8-10 props ranging from Stem Cell research to where to dump our garbage.

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180 days without rain here in San Diego. If we don’t get anything tomorrow we’ll set a record for the city. That’s half a year without rain!

San Diego poised to break drought record — again

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