In search of a birthday party

My roommate is hitting the big 4-0 tomorrow.

I’ve been trying for a couple of months now to figure out what to do - it’s one of those landmark birthdays, after all. I wanted a surprise party. He’s hard to do that for, however, due to his completely wonky work schedule and complete lack of planning - which is contradictory, considering how terribly anal he is about things, but there it is. For weeks, casual interested questions into his activity for this week have been met with “I might go here” and “maybe I’ll be there” and “I think I’ll do x” and none of it has helped me pin down a likely time and place to pull something off. He’s been (so far as I can tell, it’s hard to know when he’s changed his story 80 times) in SF with relatives, in Sacramento with his dad for father’s day, and called this morning to say he’d be back here around three or so. The reason he called was to ask about what type of DVD player he should get to play divx videos (I think my burgeoning collection is too tempting for him) and that he’s thinking about stopping at Fries, which store we do not have here in Dust Bowl, Central Calif. After some name brand dithering, I informed him that the model he’s looking at in the Fries ad is twenty bucks cheaper at Costco right now, and it’s much easier to return the thing to Costco than drive back to SF to Fries, if it doesn’t work.

I don’t think he suspects anything is up — at least not tonight. Because today’s the day before his birthday, and also, I’ve been lobbing suggestions of a trip to the coast, to the aquarium, to walk around at Point Lobos where the temps are not 110F in the shade (I think I’m going to break some sort of world record for drinking ice tea any time now).

But, I just sweated for two hours in my AC-less car to buy balloons and a present and leave them at his favorite sushi restaurant, whose proprieter he knows, and I’ve made calls to pretty much everyone in the area he knows well enough to drink sake with, and somewhere around 5:45 I’m going to pry him out the door and head that direction, wailing that he never takes me for sushi any more and let’s do that tonight since we’ve nothing better to do.

I wonder how much sake it will take to get him to sing karaoke?