Ah, thirty. Well, I’m glad to finally have made it here and for it to not be some distant looming menace.
My present stash was impressive. A big box from the whanau awaited, filled with such goodies as a keyring with an impressively bright light, a kitchen utility knife, and a hundred-year-old cooking book that will surely find many uses in my kitchen (Did I mention that I still don’t know how to work the oven?).
There was a celebratory fire alarm evacuation at work, which lead to a celebratory standing by the side of the road session. Hooray!
Soon after was the Captioning Christmas Lunch. Hell pizza was eaten, $10 presents were randomly given out (I got a milk frother, which is something I’d recently thought about buying. Score!), and a quiz was held. My team (Jem’s Bitches) won, but it was close.
Then out came the birthday cake. I’d bought a cake from Fraser’s cafe and some of the captioners had put some candles in it. I believe there were indeed 30 candles and they lit up the whole room. I managed to blow out the outer ring of candles, but the closely packed inner ring refuse to deflame. Instead they blazed brighter, spitting wax out on the icing and spewing smoke into the room, sparking fears that another fire alarm evacuation may end up happening.
But the lads came to the rescue, and plucked out Vulcan’s flaming spears of destruction and extinguished them in a glass of orange and mango Fresh Up. After the wax blobs were scraped off, the cake was eaten. It was good.
We played a boardgame called Cranium. It’s a bit like Trivial Pursuit, but with more interesting and fun bits. At one stage all three teams had to guess a word using charades. It was my turn to do the miming and the word was hormone. Other teams tried polite, ladylike “sounds like door” kind of mimes, but I wasn’t afraid to mime the first syllable.
As low-key as all this is, it’s strangely turned out more fun than my 21st was.
