Happy Birthday, Matrix Group!

Last Friday night, Matrix Group celebrated the company's 9th anniversary at Continental, a pool hall in Rosslyn, VA. Matrix Group turned 9 back in May, but we were too swamped to celebrate, so we waited until after the end of our fiscal year to celebrate.

What a fun time! We had the purple room (fitting, no?), which had a (blue) pool table and a Wii. We had between 30-40 people at various times and it was great to hang out with staff and their SOs (significant others). I had never seen Andrew and Deb so relaxed, and it was fun to socialize with my siblings (Alex and Patricia) and hubbie.

One downside: the bar was super smoky. I was overwhelmed by the smoke when we walked in, then grew accustomed to it, but four hours in a smoky bar with bad ventilation was sure to catch up with me. All weekend, I felt like I had smoke a pack of cigarettes. Ick. My chest feels awful. And today, I have a cough. New rule: all company events that I sign the check for are going to be in non-smoking establishments.

The highlight of the evening was the pool tournament. Who knew that Matrix Group had so many pool sharks? James, Ben and Trevor are excellent players, and Elyse, Maggie, Alex and Brad were very good, as well. James even stopped drinking while playing coz he was in the finals! I played with Alex and didn't sink one ball. Oh well, my goal was to just hit balls. Patricia and James won the tournament, each taking home a purple iPod shuffle with www.matrixgroup.net engraved on the back.

Emi even ordered a birthday cake for Matrix and we sang Happy Birthday to Matrix Group around 9:00pm. Nice touch.

We had a bar tab minimum of $1,000, which we were not close to reaching by 8pm (the party started at 6pm and was supposed to end at 9pm), so I asked everyone to order expensive drinks. Tanya was drinking Kettel One cosmopolitans, and Dianne's sweetie was drinking Grey Goose martinis. Thank goodness Patricia sweet talked the manager into giving until 11, without charging us extra for the room. That gave us plenty of time to finish the pool tournament, meet our bar tab minimum, and let everyone sober up before going home. I even made sure we had DDs (designated drivers) for those drinking the most. Fun times!