What a lovely weekend!

Saturday HRH went over to his parents’ house and helped his dad build the new back deck until they got rained out. The boy and I lazed around the house all morning: he watched the fifth and final disc of the first season of the Animaniacs, while I read and surfed online. HRH came home halfway through the boy’s nap once it had started to rain, and wow, did it ever rain for the rest of the day! We sat on the back doorstep and watched the wicked storms roll in, and when it began to be too wet back there we opened the front living room wall living room patio doors and sat there watching the rain pound the road and the huge maple tree whip around in the high winds. HRH had to go downstairs and rescue the garage from flooding, as the drain at the base of the driveway had blocked with dirt and maple keys. It was fabulous storm, and watching it was a lot of fun, too. At one point the thunder rolled and Liam clapped, then said, “That’s the big man in the sky with his hammer!” HRH turned to me and said with deep satisfaction, “My place in Valhalla is now assured.” The storm’s damage was impressive, including flooded highways that created miserable traffic problems that we saw but fortunately didn’t have to deal with, as we drove in the opposite direction that night.

HRH’s parents arrived at five, and I opened my birthday gifts from both sets of parents because the boy was nearly beside himself with excitement wondering what was in them. My parents had given me a copy of The Cello Suites (the recent book by a Montreal journalist, not a recording, because I have at least three four five of the latter) and a fabulous tiny micro-grater, while HRH’s parents gave me a lovely candle and money to put toward whatever I liked. Then HRH and I headed out to meet Ceri and Scott for a sushi dinner that had been planned for about four months. We ate fabulously delicious sushi, and then discussed the merits of moving on to a place like Rockaberry’s for dessert versus returning to their place to play Rock Band. The discussion didn’t last long: Rock Band it was! We played for a good couple of hours and then drove home in yet another storm in order to release HRH’s parents from babysitting the boy, so they could go home before the storm got any worse.

Sunday morning they tried to let me sleep in but the boy was too excited about the day. “Do you know what your presents are? Will they be surprises?” he kept sneaking in to my room to whisper. We went back to HRH’s parents’ house so HRH could help his dad finish the deck that had been rained out the day before, and the boy, his Grandma and I went out to pick up groceries. Once back home, the boy napped while HRH went out to pick up ice and my not-so-secret-by-that-point birthday present, and I made a Thai noodle salad for the small birthday picnic I’d planned.

One of the intangible birthday gifts I received came during my weekly phone call with my mother. My parents had flown out to Vancouver to visit with my grandmother last week, while they were there they took Gran out to the library. They set her up at a computer, put a set of headphones on her, and my dad cued up the URLs to some of the videos taken at the Canada Day concert. It didn’t quite sink in for her until my dad moved the cursor to point at me in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, at which point she exclaimed quite loudly (she is rather deaf and had headphones on, after all). Fortunately, the people around her in the library were amused rather than upset. Mum says Gran was quite overcome and couldn’t stop talking about it. “I knew she was in an orchestra, but I had no idea it was like that,” she apparently said. I’m just thrilled that she finally got a chance to see and hear a concert, and I’m especially pleased that it was this particular performance. One of the ideas behind the MiniDisc player was to send her some sort of recording, but she doesn’t have a CD player or a computer, and I have no way to record it into cassettes (if she even has a cassette deck any more), and as we saw on Canada Day, the MiniDisc may not be capable of handling the level of music produced by the orchestra. The video was a much more personal way of sharing it with her. So once again, I’m thankful that the HD video was made.

We packed for the picnic, and on the way to the park we stopped to pick up balloons, as the boy says all birthdays require balloons. Unfortunately, the wind was so strong that half an hour after we arrived they were tugged loose from the picnic backpack to which we’d attached them, and they rose to tangle in the branches of the huge poplar tree under which we sat. It was pretty, but not as pretty as having them right there with us, and rather put paid to my plan of sending them home with the kids in attendance. Everyone had made some kind of salad to share, which was terribly amusing, but they were all very different: pasta salad, strawberry/walnut/spinach salad, two-potato and corn salad, my Thai noodle salad, and I think I’m missing one. It was a light and refreshing meal. I didn’t bake a cake this year; instead, we’d bought one that morning that was nice and light and not too sweet. There were nine adults and three kids, which made for a small and relaxed group. Pasley, Jeff and the girls gave me a lovely amber-coloured beaded necklace with a photo pendant of an owl on it (and a moon on the other side!) and a set of earrings to match, and Devon drew me a really excellent card of me playing my cello.

We wrapped everything up around six, and came home. I played with the iPod Touch that HRH and Meallanmouse had given me and thanks to the free wifi network nearby downloaded a couple of free apps (Twitterrific and Stanza being the ones I am the most excited about) and then several free e-books. (A Room With a View! Howards End! Persuasion! Sense & Sensibility! Pride & Prejudice! Jane Eyre! The Prisoner of Zenda! And just to blow the curve, His Majesty’s Dragon!) Now I have lots of my favourite books with me all the time, and I will never be caught without something to read again. This makes me disgustingly gleeful, and also smug. I can’t get over how crisp and clear the screen is, how easy it is to read on it, and how accurate the on-screen keyboard is. Liam wandered into my office after his nap yesterday and said, “What’s that?” “It’s, um, like a little computer that plays music and I can read books on it, too,” I said. He climbed on my lap and watched me tap my way through some things, then asked if he could try it. I pulled up Notes for him and said, “Why don’t you try typing your name?” He hunted and pecked, and again I was amazed at how accurate the keyboard was, even for preschool fingers. He slipped off my lap and left my office with the Touch, saying, “I’ll bring this back to you when I’m finished with it.” I found him in the living room typing things. He’d figured out that if he turned it so that the screen was landscape instead of portrait, the keyboard enlarged. He’d also found something that made a terrible buzzing sound, so I rescued it before he could do something irreparable to it. The Touch is currently decked out in the cartoon skulls and bones skin that Meallanmouse had on it, which amuses me because it is so cute and so punk at the same time. “Does the Touch have a name yet?” Ceri asked me this morning. “At the moment it is called the YAY NEW TOY, all in caps,” I replied.

The boy developed a cold last Thursday evening, which means he got it at school at the beginning of last week. It’s not bad, but I have it now too, of course. Which, apart from the sad loss of the lovely balloons, was the only down side to the weekend. Well, I would have liked to have seen HRH some more, but we did get out on Saturday night, and that was absolutely wonderful. And tonight’s meeting has been cancelled, so perhaps we will be able to play some more Rock Band together. (It will come as a surprise to absolutely no one to know that I hold the bass like a cello because it’s easier on my hands and arms. This is fine in the Wii version because the upright position triggers overdrive as soon as the option is available, but the Xbox wants me to move the bass to trigger it and won’t recognise the left/down motion I make or the return to upright, so all that lovely energy was wasted. Scott told me to use the Select button, which works very well instead, except I need to time it properly so I don’t start missing notes.)

So all in all, the birthday weekend was very pleasant indeed. It was relatively low-key, and I have a new toy whose code name is YAY NEW TOY, and there is a piece of cake left in the fridge for me. I have a pile of new music by The Donnas, courtesy of Ceri, to speed me along my day of work. And my birthday celebration continues throughout the week, what with the Mac Mini appointment Tuesday night, and my local family birthday dinner this coming Saturday night!