Updatius I had a Birthdayius!

Oh yay, in the time since I wrote my last blog post I had a birthday, now I’m writing to you a whole year older. Well no I’m really only 16 days older, that's one of the main things that annoys me about birthdays; I’m not suddenly a whole year older. All the maturing and growing and changing doesn't all just get dumped on you every 365 or 6 days. The fifth of May is just like any other day, like the 4th of May or the 6th of May or the 12th of August. Everyday your one day older, everyday you learn something new, every day you grow a little; it might be your bones, it might be your hair, it might be your brain; something changes every day. To all those people that wait until midnight to shout "It's your birthday", well done, you are correct,  just please don't follow that sentence with "You're a whole year older" because you're not. Yes its the day of your birth, but you're one day older than you were yesterday, 1 hour older than you were 60 minutes ago, 1 minute older than you were 60 seconds ago but you are not, suddenly, a whole year older. And if you are going to get into the whole "Oh my, you're a whole year older" thing you may as well wait until 10.20am GMT+8 time, just to be accurate (we are of course ignoring the little irregularities where the days get longer and shorter and there are leap years and leap seconds and earthquakes and tsunamis).

Well that was quite an awesome introduction, if I can say so myself. I don't want to write any more of a post now because it wont match up to the awesomeness of that introduction =C. Oh well, here it goes!

Birthday morning I tiptoed down stairs, just after getting out of bed, to turn on the internet's wireless router with the intention of checking my emails knowing mum would complain if I didn't get and reply to her's before school. Instead of checking my email I spent the 45 mins between turning on the internet and leaving the house to catch the bus Skyping with mum. It appears she set an alarm so she could be on the computer as soon as I got out of bed. It was nice but made getting ready for school slightly difficult, fortunately I can multitask almost anything with talking so it wasn't that huge of a problem.

It was Thursday so I had Religion first with just under half of the class. We were in the computer lab researching in groups our allocated religion/religious sect. I am in a group with Suzi and Ilaria, we are researching the Anglican Church. My interrogation is this Thursday (yes an interrogation, the first of 3 or 4 I must complete in my 10ish remaining days of school). Susi was the only one in the class that even had a vague idea my birthday was coming up soonish and I was happy not to remind her. The next hour we were back with the rest of the class, but the teacher (for science) wasn't there, so they spent most of the lesson chatting while I read Harry Potter e la piertra folosfale (I don't think I've mentioned it previously; I went to a book shop and bought HP1 in Italian. I'm currently 1 chapter in and have written down 250ish new words to learn). Clod (who I now sit next to, we changed the seating arrangement) remembered half way through the class and proceeded to wish me a 'happy birthday' before announcing it to the class to which I received lots of 'auguri's' while I hid in my hands (less than normal I will have you note!)

I like to play games to see how long it will take people to remember/notice things (like me having my braced off, which took all but one of my friends until recess, TWO HOURS into school), for someone I've only known for a few months I think Clod did quite remembering only 30 mins into our first class together. She cannot however beat one of my friends in Perth, Catriona, who walked up to me before school in 2009 with an envelope, said "is today your birthday?", gave me the envelope and walked off to unpack her bag before school. That was epic. I hadn't mentioned anything about my birthday at all, she just walked up, gave me the envelope and walked off leaving the other friends around me in a stunned state of 'omg, today's your birthday?'.

I don't remember anything else interesting happening at school that day so I'm just going to assume the rest of it was a normal Thursday at school. When I got home from school, I talked to a friend, the Kuostar, on Skype for a while, then ate half my lunch before talking to Dad and Tibs, then just Tibs on Skype. By the time I finished that it was past 4 in the arvo and the second half of my lunch had magically disappeared somewhere so I gave up and decided to just hang out to dinner. For dinner we had lamb because when Sara asked if I liked it (to prove that Sele is strange for not) I said that I did and eating lamb was kinda Australian.

In the afternoon Sara set about making a torta for my birthday cake. It was a sort of sliceish thing with jam in the middle. She made one with plum jam made by Nonna Giovannini and another with store bought apricot fam. We had rather a dilemma about what candles/numbers to put on the top as they had practically every number except and 8 (and possibly there was no 2 either). In the end we were coming up with interesting ways to get to 18 via addition, we had 17 and 1 at one point but my personal favourite was 3177. In the end we went with 93 up the front (my birth year in case you didn't know/can't add) and three 6 candles. It looked something like this:

I am not sure how I managed it but some how I have forgotten to tell you that Sara's friend Carman came over on Wednesday evening to 'spend some time on my hair'. She attempted to curl it with a straightening iron, I say attempted because it worked fine up until she split the curls at which point it just turned into normal person wavy hair, I found it rather amusing. I think it was supposed to be a sort of birthday gift, some how appeasing my intense desire to have straight hair. Yeah, I'm not really fussed that my hair is slightly mad, it has character, but having straight hair was rather a novelty. The thing I wanted to do was tie it in a ponytail that would hand down and swish rather than a giant pompom velcroed to the back of my head. Yeah, it's definitely a novelty. In fact, keeping on the novelty track (and jumping to Sunday) I got bored after watching a You Tube tute on what Tibs did to her hair to go our one day and gave myself (semi-fail) Victory Curls. I have only crappy webcammy photos of it and the weren't that good so you'll just have to wait until I have straight hair again for a photo of it.

For my birthday party we decided to invite people over to the house for an afternoony teaish thing. Sara decided that Friday would be a good day for this. As it turns out the majority of my class does sport on Friday afternoons. No-one told me this until Thursday evening which was a pain but anyway, we decided to go out the next Saturday night. So on Friday we ended up having only a bunch of Sele's friends and the other Aussie exchangie in Torino, Chloe, come but it was still fun. We spent a while playing card games with the Briscola cards that Chloe got me for my birthday, and then Sele, her friends and Tancredi got up and danced to a bunch of songs which was hilarious! I collected Chloe from the Centre on my way home from school and when we got home Sara excitedly came up to me with a little paper bag. When I opened it up it had a candle, a little stand and a 1 and an 8 in it. She'd gone out and bought them so we could have the right numbers on my torta/cake this time.

Right so, last thing I write about before I go nighnighs; what I got for my birthday. So as I said before Chloe gave me a set of Briscola cards, Sele gave me a pair of jeans, I'm wearing them at the moment so it's too difficult to organise a photo of them but I'll let you know when they make an appearance in another photo. From Sara I got a silver necklace with a black cat on it. From Nonna Irma and Nonna Aldo I got a lovely bunch of roses (which I stupidly didn't get a photo of =C), a wooden jewellery box and a little coin purse. My host cousin, Bianca, gave me a pair of shorts. Tibs is organising to get me a sciencey computer game where you build molecules an stuff, which sounds really cool. Mum and dad gave me a pair of Dr Who boxers (as an early present), a CD and some wool and a crochet hook (as a late present because it took forever in the post) and I get my more serious present when I see them in America for the Future Problem Solving Internationals in three weeks (oh my god that's soon!). Explanation about the wool and crochet hook; I said that I needed to do something with my hands because I am a do-ey person and all this learning a new language is brainy stuff and I'm not doing anything. And thus Mum has given me the means where by I must relearn how to crochet.

Actually, no! I think I will briefly write about what I did with my class mates too. We went out to a pizza place and this thing called 'pizza giro' which is really just like all you can eat pizza; you pay a fixed price and they just keep bringing out pizza to your table in waves until you tell them to stop. It was quite fun. There ended up being 15 of us which is about all the people I've vaguely had anything to with, minus a couple who had something else on or were sick. I had Happy Birthday sung to me in three different languages; English, Italian and I'm not sure what the other one was.......... Nibras taught it to the karaoke dude so it's what ever language they speak in the country she's from, but I'm not entirely sure what that is. Anyway from the class I got a very nice braccialetto (bracelet).