Last night, I was birthday party ambushed.
In hindsight, I should have put two and two together and realized that I was going to be birthday party ambushed. My friend Cristin had called me up to see if she and our friends Adele and Jill could come out to my house and visit, and the visit was planned the night before Cristin’s birthday on July 6th. In the past, because so many of my friends have July birthdays, I’ve held a group birthday party, but my health lately has been not so great, so I haven’t done that in a few years. I’m off my birthday game considerably. So I didn’t even make the connection that this might be a birthday thing, even though my birthday is on July 15th, and Cristin asked me what kind of cake I liked.
Obviously, I should not have been surprised when it turned into a birthday party ambush.
They came bearing a beautiful cake, and gifts.
Adele brought me this t-shirt:
Which matched the beautiful flower lei that Cristin brought me. Being a Fannibal, I knew just what to do with it:
See, isn’t that much more festive?
Said Cristin of buying me a plastic pineapple and a barrel of dollar store monkeys for my birthday: “Usually, if I bought that for someone, they would just look at it and go, ‘that’s funny,’ but I know Jen is actually going to use the items.”
Jill is also giving me a present, a human finger bone she nicked from a biology skeleton. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to own that, by law. But it was from a skeleton, so… you know, it’s for science. It’ll go well with my collection of non-human bones, and it’ll creep the hell out of visitors I show it to.
Then, because we’re nerds, we cracked out my copies of Weird Michigan, Weird Pennsylvania, Weird U.S.A., and The Dictionary of Hauntings, sat around the dining room table, and red quietly to ourselves.
Because we’re party animals.
But it was a really amazing night. I’d spent the whole day in a really bad Fibromyalgia flare-up (you can probably tell from the picture that I was definitely not feeling my best), but my friends came over and gave me the best birthday I could have hoped for, that was exactly my speed. My friends are awesome.