Friday 15 June 2012

Birthday Retrospect

I think The Housemate had a pretty good birthday.

As usual he got a good haul, gift-wise.  Luckily he knows a lot of materialistic and generous people.

He’s better at gift-buying than I am.  He buys his throughout the year so he never has to lose a lot of money in one go.  I don’t.  I don’t have much concept of time.  Everything happened ‘the other day’.  Three months or two and a half days – it’s all the same to me.  I know there was Everything Before 2005 and Everything After That, but smaller details, like years, weeks, hours…  I don’t notice.  It just doesn’t occur to me that time is passing and that dates are approaching. 

So when I realised The Housemate’s birthday was in less than a fortnight, I was very aware of the no gifts I had yet bought. 


So I bought him a couple things off his wish list that I, I mean he, really wanted and also the cheapest thing on there to bulk it up a bit, and something off-list, because he likes surprises.

He’s pretty easy to surprise.  A few years ago I threw him a surprise party (absolute hell to organise) and although potential guests kept mentioning it within hearing distance, and he was baffled that I was for some reason tidying the house, and I made the fatal error of putting a HAPPY BIRTHDAY banner on the front of the house, he didn’t suspect a thing.

And (birthday-wise, at least) he’s pretty easy to please too. 

Okay, we did see The 39 Steps as well that year, which The Housemate loved, so I’m not totally selfish…  Mostly, but not totally.

This year, I pulled up some tourist locations we could visit and let him have a browse.  He was swayed by two things.  One, a picture of some cake, and two, a picture of a sloth.  So that was The Aim.  Give The Housemate a birthday that featured both cake and sloths.

Cake

Sloth

SUCCESS!

The Housemate’s birthday, 2012 (the bits involving me, anyway)


PRE-BIRTHDAY WARM UP:

The Slayer visited and we played a board game called Smart Ass.  I won.  We played James Bond Scene It.  No one won.
We played normal Scene It.  The Housemate won.  Then The Housemate went to see Prometheus at the cinema. 
I stayed behind and did cooking so we could have a picnic the next day.

Besides, I have no stomach for murder-death in films.  Much like how a scene in which a child is crying for its parent reduces me to a quivering mass of tears, a scene in which someone is screaming for help rips right through me and I cannot watch if they do not receive the help they’re begging for.  To The Housemate’s endless frustration, the film has to go off while I find a corner to either curl up and rock in, or throw up in.


So I figured I’d give Prometheus a miss.

THE ACTUAL BIRTHDAY:

I brought The Housemate breakfast (cards and presents) in bed.  Then we met The Critic and another friend and went on a tour of the Isle Of Wight

We visited Amazon World Zoo Park and ate a vegan picnic of French bread, salad, sausage rolls, flapjacks, brownies, cupcakes, cookies and fruit salad.  (EDIT 2016: visiting a zoo is not really an appropriate activity for a vegan, I now realise.  The small enclosures were very distressing.)  Afterwards we played pirate minigolf.  The overall par was 21.  The Housemate got 44. 

He won.

POST-BIRTHDAY COOL DOWN:

A friend visited, I made a birthday cake and we watched one of The Housemate’s favourite films, The Iron Giant. 
We ate three bags of sweets, watched all of season 3 of 30 Rock and all of season 2 of My Name Is Earl.

That’ll do, won’t it?

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