Happy birthday my favourite humanfemale!

May all your days be witty and shiny and gay.

I am lunching on a slab of chocolate. A slab! Morevor one containing strawberries and cookies and meringue. I'm not sure that can be topped.

For most of my life (thanks to starting and finishing school earlier than my peers) I have been the youngest, feeling one step behind everyone, out of sync as though I was perpetually racing ahead to catch up with the longer legged. I'd define most of my twenties as knowing exactly what I wanted to do but not being old enough to do it (case in point, it is not possible to start to train as a psychotherapist until you're at least 25). My early to mid-twenties were my meanwhile years, my treading water years. An ungainly growing-out, in-between stage.

And even as I aged, even as I finally became old enough to embrace my vocation it didn't feel real enough. Sure, rationally I knew I was older but the gift of those years didn't sink in. I might have been 26 but I still felt 20 - an impostor trying to pass myself as older than I was, trying to gatecrash, to sneak into the good stuff while waiting for my life to be allowed to really start.

When asked how old I was I would always have to pause, think about it much in the same way that I have to pause and calculate how many years Z and I have been together. I lose track of time, its passing feels dreamlike, I keep having to pause and reorient myself in its flow as I would in the streets of an unkown city or a place glimpsed through the windows of a car.

But now that I am 28, I finally feel 28. As though I don this age like a tailored dress.

It's appropriate enough, it's a Saturn return year and I'm finally where I want to be anchored to the earth by love and responsibility. I am a mother and an apprentice, and I love both things. But more than that I finally have a feeling of belonging, of having worked hard to get here and of doing good work and feeling worthy of respect of being recognised for my achievements.

I am glad to be here. I have travelled a long way. I am no longer the waif or the changeling, the alien or the impostor. I suspect I will always be an eccentric and outsider of sorts (this is fine, I think I would find normalcy a dissapointing experience) but at long last I belong to my true self and my life, the person I am meant to be and the life I am meant to lead are greeting each other rapturously like old friends meeting, like lovers shrugging off adversity and all the years they lost and wasted treading in space.

I have had a most wonderful day fortified as it has been by some wonderful people, and excellent cake, and two charming babies, and the sky never actually shedding rain even after Z nearly doomed us all by calling the clouds' bluff.

Now that my mother is here I am finding I can get an amazing amount of stuff done and the house is looking properly gleamy and shiny for once, which makes a refreshing and surreal change.

Also, proof that I am essentially an optimist at heart- typing 'benign baby seizures' into Dr Google.

Today is Z's 34th birthday. Happy birthday honeybunny! I love you lots and lots! So much so that I got up early to make you coffee and didn't succumb to the temptation to have hormonal fightey weep-fests at 2am!

Maternity leave is GLORIOUS. I continue to sleep almost as much as the cats. In fact I think the cats and I are acquiring something akin to a Collective Mind whereby we all enjoy a leisurly snooze then maybe get up for something to eat and a bit of love and then sleep again.

I feared I might be bored, but truthfully I haven't been awake for long enough for that to happen. Currently there's nothing I don't love about being home, from being able to play on the internet whenever I want to it being perfectly socially acceptable to combat pelvic pain by walking around while clutching my crotch and moaning.

And to prevent myself from feeling like a complete wastrel I have packed my hospital bag and even though I've tried to take the minimum of stuff I still feel like I'm preparing to go camping/survive the Apocalypse.

This morning I noticed that Urchin Cat is looking a lot more of a belly then when she first came, meaning that a) either I've been feeding her more than I've realised or b) she's pregnant. And I was immediately seized by a terrifying and nightmarish vision of attempting to tend to a baby while ankle deep in kittens, a vision so dreadful that I realised my 'i will take her to the vet when she stops being so scared of getting into a box' was not going to cut the mustard anymore. So I called Cats Protection League, who are coming to pick her up today or tomorrow. And I have spent the intervening two hours crying.

Partially because no doubt the hormones, they are raging. Partially because I've grown so attached to her that I will miss her desperately when she's not around. But mostly because I know how batshit-insanely terrified she is of people-who-are-not-me and even more so of being put into boxes. So the thought of someone coming to stuff her into a box and then into a pen- it breaks my heart. Even though I know this is so necessary (after all she needs to be vaccinated, and neutered and checked for microchips and all that, but I still feel like I'm handing her over to be tortured). And when she shows me her delicious strokable belly and bats and melts under my touch and lovingly headbutts me all full of joy and trust I feel like even more of a Judas.

And I thought I was so hardcore because I didn't snuffle watching Animal Hospital.

A few days ago I turned 26 and Z drove us to Cornwall to spend the weekend in a rented house with a lively bunch of people from Ooop Norff and a dog. The house we stayed in was as beautiful - a multi-storey detached building built on the very cliff face, with a long balcony looking out onto the harbour.

Port Isaac felt almost like an isolated pocket of time, with its narrow streets and weird location beyond the reaches of any mobile phone network. It was all very restful, and people threw me a lovely birthday party with candles and everyone laughed and I tunelessly but gaily sang the refrains of folk songs that the more musically adept played on the guitars. It was lovely, and relaxing, and it felt like the day stretched into forever.

The sea was freezing cold, and generally a bit rubbish but the ice cream was excellent and there were many splendid features of the Port Isaac experience. We were:

1. Entertained by the car parking on the beach that comes with tide timetables and warning signs.





2. Enticed and titillated by the Porno Mermaid.


3. Impressed by the lovely views.


4. Outraged by the prices of meals, and coffees and miscellaneous tourist tat.

5. Frightened by the teeny tiny teeny uphill streets through which cars could be guided with the ease of camels transiting eyes of needles.


And now I'm back in London, quietly expiring on my day off while the neighbours upstairs seem to be having sex while power drilling.

Happy Birthday to that cutie and icon-wizard dubaiyan!

I hope you have a lovely day and may happy returns thereof, darling.

x

Happy birthday to mah hunny auzerais!
Your present is in email.

Happy birthday to elethe!

I hope you have a fab day and a year filled with rewards of creative fire!

Yesterday it appears that everyone but annasilverlight and me were at the Dead Can Dance gig, which I'm a bit guttered about since I love DCD but have no one but myself to blame for insufficient alertness as to the fact that they were playing. [Although I'm pleased that by the sounds of it everyone had a good time].

{And I can have my own concert in my head for tubewalker wrote a song for me. :)}

However! I did discover that I can rent 6 DVDs a month from amazon.co.uk for £10 and this pleases me a great deal, as did the words "No postage costs, no late fines".

I am also made happy by the fact that parents are actually seeking out our office, and our service and asking for help which I've been able to provide [the first time my referrals went through without a hitch I was half convinced it was an April Fools joke, but since then it's kept happening]. Obviously I'm pleased that I am able to serve the people I am actually meant to serve, and delighted that the work we've put in in the previous six months appears to be paying off, but! I am less happy about the fact that for the past week I've had to stay longer in order to get done all the new work that my work has generated, and that I'm still knee deep in forms to fill in, and that I haven't the vaguest of what to put on my Workplan whose deadline is today, and that for the past few days I've felt too knackered to have a social life.

I am also not delighted that despite busting my ass [along with the rest of the Outreach Team] every day, that the pay rise we received upon passing our appraisal has been a termendous... wait for it... £13 a month. Oh yes. Therefore bringing my salary to a princely sum of £846.
Oh yes. I'm sure my glee is radiating from the screen and spreading little waves of warm happiness throughout the universe.
Except that due to some administrative error last month they forgot to pay me my increased salary so that at the end of April my paycheck will rise by £26! Kerching! That's all my finances sorted then! I'll try and restrain myself from blowing it all at once.

BUT! I am happy about Peacekeeper Wars with norantiskitchen and voiceofsauron tomorrow, and about mzdt dropping by to visit today, and about all the lovely people who've bought me all the lovely drinks in the past few months.

Who would be turning 59 today, were he still alive.

Happy Birthday to my man mzdt, him of the excellent buttocks, the new interest craze that's sweeping the LJ nation.

Thank you muchly for your hospitality over the weekend, and I hope you have a good one.