The First Days of Phorty

Last weekend was the grand occasion of my becoming a forty year old (in body, mind is a little harder to judge).

On the Saturday night - the actual anniversary of my birth as luck would have it - I held a magnificent soiree to which I invited friends, family, fun people, and librarians. So many were in attendance that were I to list them all the tagging system for the blog would collapse under the weight of numbers.
Instead I shall just say that it was a magnificent night thoroughly enjoyed by yours truly and, if I'm any judge, by all in attendance.

Highlights include: Freeloading Mum mistaking Spare Legion for myself "oh good Phillip I've found you"; The Great Sandro getting along famously with many; BestFriendSincePrep's whinging about missing the first round of cake resulting in him in his being presented with no less than five pieces from the second round; and Mr Prada almost succeeding in abandoning Supervisor Grand Chief K when heading home.

The end of the evening saw a small group of us walk back to my flat causing every venue we attempted to enter on the journey merely by staggering in the front door "Sorry guys we're just closing for the night" was the refrain.

Successfully making it back we proceeded to embark on a port and Pez fuelled rampage (Pez courtesy of Sister Serials wonderful present) all to the strains of Conan the Barbarian thoughtfully playing in the background thanks to BestFriendSincePrep.


I awakened the next morning with the only flat-company being BestFriendSincePrep in the spare room - well, and The Tiger busily trying to usurp his position on the spare bed.
We had a wonderful cafe breakfast and then I was on my own to use my new found oldness to justify napping my way through the afternoon.


I took the chance that evening to finally go and see Avatar lest it leave the cinemas unseen by oneself, a situation that would put a severe dent in one's geek cred.
I found it good that the story was easily digested which made it easy to concentrate on taking in the wow factor of the special effects and new 3D process. As a wearer of eyeglasses I am quite impressed with how well the physicality of the glasses works.

More of my impressions of Phortiness to come...
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My Week of Cake

This year my birthday week has been focused on baked goods - specifically cake.

I started the dessert theme myself, as one often has to, by concealing subtle hints within my weekly update to my library staff concerning my projected whereabouts for the remainder of the week.
Here is an example of the level cunning subtleness I employed:

Tuesday Feb 2: At SAN library all day fixing computers and possibly getting surprise birthday cake.

At first it appeared not to have worked as I went a whole day without cake. However my Wednesday arrival at BEA branch was greeted with not one but two cakes - joy!
It seems that Devil's Advocate had supplied a largish piece of Emergency Cake in case there was a critical lack of cake in my system.
So having polished off the Emergency Cake I moved on to tackling the larger, yet just as delightfully chocolaty, cake supplied by The Beaumaris Ballerina. Some time after that I started fixing computers and other things IT in a state of cake-induced fugue.

Thursday was such a blur of meetings and schnitzel lunches and crazy weather that I failed to notice the lack of any cake-ish things.
This serious lapse from my compatriots was rectified on Friday morning when I stepped out of a morning meeting into a cake wonderland - complete with the second present (no wait Pirate Dave gave me some Dolphin Clips Thursday night - let your imagination run wild about what exactly a Dolphin Clip is...) I mean Third present.

See how happy I am with my giant RFID tag cake courtesy of Days of our Libraries
(couriered in secretly by Bomber Babe).

My cake euphoria carried me through the remainder of the day and into the evening where I caught up with birthday twin CC having drinks to celebrate her attaining a measly total age on the morrow.
I stayed only long enough to down a couple of drinks and treated the whole exercise as a training run for this evenings main event.

Now I'd best be off to gussy myself up for my time in the limelight tonight. After all there is such an awful lot of gussying to be done.

I'll end with a caution for you oh good readers of mine: with what BestFriendSincePrep has planned for this evening, and knowing his track record, I fear that this missive may very well be the last time you hear from me alive...
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