My 30th birthday was one to remember, for sure. I wanted to thank everyone for coming and share some thoughts about it all.

First, Jaime is amazing — she put this all together and… wow. Just, wow. <3

Second, I realized that I didn’t give any sort of speech or say anything monumental to everyone there. I was sort of speechless and made a point to move from table to table, so didn’t really give a speech or anything.

But I thought about this a bit afterwards, and if given another chance, I probably would have said something like:

You’re only as good as the people who support you. When you stumble, they help you pick yourself up. When you succeed, you succeed together. I’ve had the luxury of friends who tell you the truth even if they know it hurts. I’ve been lucky enough to have the loyalty and love of my friends (real friends, not Facebook friends), and as I get older I value them more and more. You’ve made my first 30 years amazing, and I’m guessing life will continue to be one hell of a ride.

Cheesy, but true. Anyway, here are some of my favorite moments:

• The confused blonde greeter who had no idea what was going on and almost blew Jaime’s cover
• Imagining Jaime beating that person up right there near the front door
• Following Jaime and this other girl to the basement of the Lucia, wondering where the hell we were going
• Walking into a room filled with most of my closest friends
• My balloons were cool
• Great food — drunken noodles, red curry and some steak stuff. Yum!
• Getting back the same tube of Preparation-H I gave Chris for his 30th
• Reading all the signatures on my basketball
• Riding with Cameron, Jaime and Erin trying to find a parking space
• Fun times at the Marathon Taverna
• Playing pool and watching Cameron sing along with Journey (with fist-pumping)
• Dancing with Cameron
• Mario Kart with Jon
• Hugging Jaime once I had processed all of it
• Feeling like the luckiest guy on earth

Finally, about birthdays — and many of you know this about me — I’m not generally a huge fan. Mainly because I don’t think it’s super fun to have people kiss your ass on your birthday if they don’t care about you the rest of the year.

This was different, of course — it was a time to stop and appreciate relationships, and I can roll with that. This meant a lot to me — just seeing everybody there made me think about all the things we’ve done together and how crazy life has been. It was just really special, and I was totally blown away. I’ll never forget it.

And even though there’s so much I can’t even fit it all into my head, it’s really just a start. We’ve got more memories to make and more things to do. So I guess the ending to this blog post is: To be continued…