Birthday

Yesterday was my birthday, and it was really quite a nice day! Just in case you're curious how one celebrates a birthday in Musoma, here's about how it went:

6:00am - Andrew woke me up and I discovered he'd made me fruit salad and hot chocolate for breakfast! He hadn't realized that our cocoa is just straight, plain baking cocoa and not hot chocolate mix so I had to add some sugar, but it was a nice treat in the morning.

6:30am - I exercised (marched in place) in the bedroom while reading a great book I'd borrowed from a friend here, "The Calligrapher's Daughter". I usually make myself work out a bit more energetically and use my arms, too, but since it was my birthday I let myself just march and read.

7:45am - As we were heading out the door to work, I realized that Andrew had fed the cats for me and put their bowls of food (dried fish) and water outside for me, even! What a husband, doing my morning chores for me on my birthday.

8:00am - Right when I got to work, Rukia, the Ikizu translator, immediately noticed I was wearing a shirt she hadn't seen very often (I don't wear it much so it'll stay looking nice) and complimented me on looking pretty. It was a nice surprise that she noticed and said something!

8:30am - When my friend Rachel got to work, she came by my office and gave my a present: a dish towel, two hot pads, and some hand-santizing lotion that smells great. It was wrapped in a great reusable ribbon, too, so that was also sort of part of the gift!

10:30am - After our morning devotion time with the whole office, Andrew announced it was my birthday and everyone sang to me. Then during our morning tea break, Rachel showed up with cookies, which was a fun surprise! She'd put candles in 29 of them, which I utterly failed to blow out. 29 is a lot of candles! The cookies were great and I ate a lot of them, definitely more than my fair share.

11:00am - I spent a few minutes on Amazon looking for what to get with the gift certificate my father-in-law gave me. I love Amazon!!!

8:00am - 4:30pm - My workday was quite nice, as I assigned myself my favorite tasks to do. I checked one and a half chapters of Ikizu Genesis, which is something I really enjoy doing. However, I happened to be on Genesis 19, which is just about my least favorite chapter in Genesis, so that was a bummer! Nothing like getting to celebrate my big day by spending hours thinking about the men of Sodom trying to break into Lot's house and then Lot and his daughters in the cave...

4:30pm - Since we were out of cat food and toilet paper, two very, very bad things to run out of, I had to run to the market after work. It wasn't terribly celebratory, but hey, it was better than going home to desperately lacking both!

5:30pm - I had done some dinner prep already, so when we got home I got to go lounge on the back porch with a cat in my lap instead of having to start working on dinner right away. Andrew gardened for a while outside and I enjoyed some book/cat time.

7:00pm - We had Korean Beef Pulgogi for dinner, and it turned out great. I opened a gift (a promising-looking book) from my mother-in-law. Andrew apologized for not having made me birthday cookies but offered to share his hard candies from Nairobi with me. I put on a doleful face and said that having some candies would be nice, and asked him to go into the kitchen to get them. He walked in and exclaimed, "Where did this cake come from? When on earth did you make this?!" I had secretly made a cake while I was making dinner and he had no idea. It was kind of fun to shock him and then we enjoyed our cake.

8:00pm - We played Quiddler and I creamed Andrew. We don't usually play too many games together on non-weekend days, so that was kind of out-of-the-ordinary and fun.

9:00pm - I finished my book with a cat on my lap. What a nice way to complete a birthday evening!