Last night, I fell asleep at the keyboard at around 9pm.For those who know me, this is unusual as 2am often finds me still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I had written a long birthday blog for Tatiana, only to hit send and have it vanish. If you don't post within a certain time span here, the page times out. I have just posted a suggestion on MUDS that this time be lengthened. That was frustrating. I fell asleep so early because I was up till 4am the previous night, baking the birthday cake, printing a couple of posters (thank you, my friend) for Tat and cooking pie filling for last night's meal. All the birthday preparations had to be done after Madame went to bed. It doesn't help that she's a night owl too and I virtually had to shove her off to bed in the end.

The day went well. My baby is now 18. Here, she can now legally drive, vote, drink, etc. Her signature is now valid on legal documents. If she were to kill me, she would be tried as an adult (take note, Tat LOL).


We started the day with coffee and cake. I will post a recipe of the cake, as it was really good, a vanilla cake with a brown butter topping - different. Pardon the messy desk here and the bad photo ; ) That is a screen capture from a tiny video.



Not long afterwards, Anne called from Holland (thank goodness for Skype) to wish Tat happy birthday. She is Tat's godmother. Anne is like me. We treasure our conversations in English and with friends, as we don't get that too often. I at least get to speak to Tat and Jorge, but she is on her own up there. She doesn't have communication issues really, but it is nice to speak in a language you're comfortable with. Four hours later and I was hankering for some quality kitchen time. When she hung up to take the dogs out, I dashed to the kitchen for some grub.

I was sitting with a mouthful of bread when the next call came in. It was my cousin from South Africa. She was my childhood playmate before a family feud separated us. We haven't seen or spoken to each other since we were... oh... way under 10 years old. She's a year younger than me. What a wonderful chat we had. There was no loss for words this time. We spoke for ages. The odd thing was that her memories are completely different to mine. I remember the times we spent at their place and she remembers the times they spent at our place. That was so peculiar. We chatted for ages. I learnt, at the same time, that my other cousin, the one I had the first contact with, has cancer, a melanoma. It was a blow. His cancer went into remission for a year and is now back. It's always one thing or another...

I woke up this morning in a 'mood'. I was tired. Somehow, we all managed to just misunderstand each other and snap at each other. I then decided some fresh air was in order. We went to the village to check for mail. Tat and I grumped all the way to the village. The road home was a little different. We didn't take our usual route home. We kept finding little pockets of magic, like the bird in my main photo. We walked and heard this trilling above us. There, in all the razor wire, was this little bird, scarcely bigger than my thumb, singing it's heart out. I have no idea what kind of bird it was. It was shortly joined by another bird. We watched them for a while before moving on. We picked some fresh grass seed for the bird at an overgrown lot and peeked in through the door of a walled off, abandoned old house. She was inspired by the scene to write a short story. Later, walking into the bakery, we heard "It's a kind of magic" by Queen. Yep... it's a kind of magic... if we just stop to look for it.