48th birthday

I woke up because the cat jumped onto the bed. I noticed she was soaking wet. I had no idea what time it was. But I realised it was my birthday! And I think she was giving me a damp duvet as a present.

Sometime later the alarm went off. I got up, and saw that I already had got a congratulation from Miles via WhatsApp. That was nice! He had sent it shortly after midnight.

I had breakfast with Tim. He had already sent me a birthday present in the mail, but told me not to open it until the actual day. And he had sneakily smuggled a cake into my house. And I didn't have to be in the office particularly early, so we first did breakfast, and then had some more coffee, and had some cake with that. A good start of the day!

At work I didn't get an awful lot done before it was time to get social again. By coincidence, our annual T&S Christmas do fell on this day. (The T&S team is the academics on a teaching contract.) The idea initially was to go for a walk, and then have some nibbles in the coffee room. But one of us is quite heavily pregnant, and she didn't fancy a walk. So the only thing we did was consume mince pies, brownies, and whatnot in the coffee room. There were only four of us for a reasonable amount of time, but it was still good.

Did I go back to the office from there? No! Our winter graduation ceremony started at 1 pm, so I had to get myself to the main campus. The graduation already has its own blog post.

After that I was glad I could bike home dry. And then we had dinner. Nothing too fancy; I was keener on something easy than something culinarily impressive. And in the evening I popped over to Martin for a glass of wine. Sue and Dean were away. (Hence that we had done a pre-birthday earlier in the month.)

Altogether it was a good day! If this sets the scene for my 49th year I’m satisfied…

A birthday card I got from Sue and Dean