It's not quite my birthday yet, but we celebrated it anyway. My actual birthday isn't until Monday, but Mondays are no good for celebrating, so today was the day.
We started out the day making sausage for the party... and Luke helped me enough that I have now crowned him the Sausage Prince to my Sausage King. He was such a big help--slicing meat, mixing spices, grinding meat and stuffing casings. I think Grandpa Duke may have a new convert. Luke really enjoyed himself, and I was glad to have the help.Of course, making sausage is pretty hard work. We made five pounds of venison sausage and six pounds of lamb sausage. It takes quite a while to mix the meat with the spices, grind it, and then stuff it into casings. All in all, it took about four hours, and by the end, my back was killing me. Just in time for people to start showing up!
We had our usual crowd over, Leslie, Scott, Sharon, Desi, Phil and Pam, plus the legions of kids that they bring with them. We didn't do anything too much, but enjoyed some grilled brats and ate some coconut birthday cake. Then, afterwards, it was a pleasure to share some of my recently acquired Aberlour 15 year Scotch single malt whisky with Desi and Phil, two gentlemen who can really appreciate a whisky like that.
The finale of the night was when Eddie and all the girls composed and presented me with a special birthday performance--captured here for posterity:
It was a pretty nice birthday party. I'm a pretty lucky guy to have friends like these.