Birthday - The Week In Pictures

Birthdays are awesome. Just so ya know. I spent a lot of time playing with my new camera, so here're some of the highlights of my birthday week in picture-form.

Yay pictures! Sooo much better than words.

Birthdayday #1- this is how I found my desk at work in the morning. Balloons! Tinsel! Llamas! Squee!

Birthdayday #2 - very pretty red velvet cupcakes. NOM.

Birthdayday #3 - lunch at a verrrry nice winery just outside of Chch with my lovely family. With verrrry nice glasses of wine.

Birthdayday #4 - Lemur feeding at Willowbank! Lemurs are awesome, lurve sultanas, and have very grabby hands.

Birthdayday #5 - getting an extreme fix of Springtime in Hanmer Springs.

Birthdayday #6 - Donuts! And a llama.

Birthdayday #7 - sophistimicated dinner at Logan Brown. With a new Beatles CD in between each course! Abbey Road is the perfect accompaniment for Tarakihi and Pinot Gris.

And it's still continuing! Yay for birthdays that go on and on and on and on and on...

Awesomesauce!

Haven’t done this for a while, but there’s a lot of awesomesauce around the place lately. Gets quite sticky underfoot.

Awesomesauce #1 – Florence and the Machine. Ballsy voice and utterly gorgeous videos, especially this one: http://tiny.cc/ROZT6. Makes me want to grow my hair long and dye it BRIGHT red again.

Awesomesauce #2 – Birthdays! I’m living in a big pink happy birthday bubble at the moment, after a trip to Chch to see ma belle famille and lots of lovely birthday messages from friends. Took lots of photos with shiny new camera, and will post these later. And there’s STILL more celebrating to come, starting with dinner at Logan Brown tonight! NOM.

Awesomesauce #3 – speaking of which, here’s to the wonderful people in my life! It’s times like these that I feel so lucky to be surrounded by people who care about me and willingly put up with my eccentricities. People who hang out with me despite all my strange whims, I salute thee!

Awesomesauce #4 – Looooooong weekend. Perfect timing. I want SUN! And I want SHOPPING! And I want ROAD TRIP! Oh and also I want SLEEP!

Awesomesauce #5 – People under 2 years of age. They just have the best time ever. Every single day. Every hour in fact. The toddler is a bundle of energy and curiosity and creates her own fun wherever she goes. I also love that she regards me as a captive audience to play up to and misbehave in front of just to see what my reaction will be. It makes me feel like the guest of honour whenever we hang out.

Awesomesauce #6 - Donuts. Okay, I know I go on about them all the time, but it's the fact that I can't get them in Wgtn that makes me obsess about them. And so when I do get a chance to have good donuts it makes it all the more exciting! And I had gooood donuts in Chch. They're still making me happy.

Awesomesauce #7 – La belle printemps! Alright, so the weather is so changeable at the moment that it could be diagnosed with schizophrenia, but when the sun comes out all is forgiven. Chch was positively marinating in spring complete with a surfeit of flowers, lambs, ducklings and blossom. Even the odd cygnet. Spring is rad and if I had my way we’d be having some kind of national holiday where we all have to take a day off work to go roll around in a field full of daisies to celebrate it. Which is why you should vote Katherine!

Birthday! Cha cha cha!

It was 26 years ago today. Or so the Beatles would have said if they'd released Sgt Pepper in 1973.

I have to say I'm liking the simple but effective use of Pebbles as cake decorations. I wonder if I had a hand in that? Given the wonkiness of the 'K', it's rather likely.

Also, I should totally start wearing frilly socks again.

Squee!

Always a good day when you find these kinds of things online. I've been looking for this for ages actually, ah so many happy memories:

http://tiny.cc/MunchBunch

Pedro Orange was always my favourite, and I'd forgotten that he does an awesome musical collaboration with the Banana Bunch in the opening titles. What a guy.

And now I'm seriously starting to wonder if this is where I get my deep-seated love of mariachi bands from?

Katherine The Also Great

So. Come Friday and I’ll be finished with this particular decade of my life. 3 down, 11 to go (yes you heard me correctly).

Yep. Interesting times. Now I really can’t hide from the fact that I am officially a Grown Up. Whoa. I have to say though that I’m rather pleased to be at the tail end of my twenties, rather than starting it all over again. As wonderful and exhilarating and fantastic as youth is, it can also be incredibly confusing and angst-ridden, and having survived all of that I am now immensely enjoying reaping the rewards of being older and wiser – namely, understanding who I am, who I’m not and recognising that, actually, it’s all good and nothing to be worried about. What’s even more enlightening is the realisation you get from talking to other people that this is such a universal experience. Everyone goes through the Age of Angst at some point, even though some people don’t show it as much as others. But in the end we all come out of it, hopefully happier and more accepting of ourselves than ever before. Aw.


Anyway, for my birthday I’d quite like a crown like Catherine the Great’s. You can’t really see it in this picture, but I’m rather fond of the one she had, it was all rubies and diamonds and awe-inspiring Slavic sparkliness. And while I’m at it a sash and a sceptre wouldn’t go amiss either.


What was Catherine the Great doing at age 30 I wonder? She was in a loveless marriage to the staggeringly incompetent Peter III, educating herself about the principles of the Enlightenment, and perfecting her political strategems until the time was right for her to wrest power from her husband in bloodless and almost effortless coup three years later. And then of course she went on to become one of the greatest monarchs of all time, a figurehead of the Enlightenment, a cultural revolutionary, a despot and a thoroughly impressive and independent female ruler. And to be frank, I’m expecting nothing less from my thirties as well.