My friend's birthday is in about three weeks and she was originally supossed to come back to celebrate her birthday with us. Plans changed and she can't make it home anymore, so I thought: why don't we throw her a surprise birthday instead? (she's back home for a week at the moment).

Have you ever thrown a surprise party before? I must admit it's a lot of work and I was stressing out a little bit trying to contact everyone and figuring out if all the things would fall into place. I didn't know whether we could pull it off in such a short amount of time...

SUNDAY...the birthday girl starts calling me. I couldn't answer because I was out with the family, so she leaves a voicemail. Call attempt 2, I let it ring because I didn't want to expose anything...which was a pretty dumb move because by not answering any calls it would've made her think that something was up. At this point I was exchanging mass text messages with her sister so we could finalize the plan. The place was set: a Mexican restaurant called Manana...everything else, not so much.