As I type this it’s 22 minutes to midnight, 22 minutes until my birthday. And if you really wanna fuck ants* to use a Dutchism, it’ll be another bunch of hours and minutes until the actual moment I age, as I wasn’t born until 17:54 or 17:56, I keep forgetting. I think it’s 17:54.

I celebrated this upcoming occasion past weekend, on Saturday with friends, and on Sunday with family. I tend to split them up as I live in a tiny house that can hold my friends, but not my family. I have a lot of them. 😀

Ingrid was the first to arrive on Saturday, and after chatting and having a drink (and Caek!) we went to play board games. Starting out with some trivial pursuit she brought. It was a topical edition about popular music, so I expected to loose. Ingrid’s a walking pop encyclopedia… However, luck and factoids were with me, and by the time Nienke barged in, I was well ahead. Yay!

With addition of Nienke, we were with enough to play Koehandel (Cow Trading), a game I bought quite a while ago, but never played yet as it needs a minimum of 3 people, and I normally can’t get Nienke to play along. This time I forced her, proclaiming that, since it was my birthday, she had no choice 😀

(If you’re not interested in games you might wanna speed through the next bit as I review the games we played.)

The game was fun, but not one of my favourites. The point is to get as many sets of animals. It starts with an auction each round, with one player being the auctioneer and the other two bidding. The winner then pays the auctioneer and gets the animal. The auctioneer can choose to excercise his right of sale by paying the highest bidder the amount they bid.

After a while, there will be people who have the same animal, and at that point they can barter for it. The one who wants to barter makes a blind offer, and the other chooses to accept or counter-offer. The addition of bluff cards (with a zero value) makes this a strategic part as you never really know what the offer is. If the other counter-offers, he too makes a blind offer and both players give their offer to the other. The one who then paid most gets the animal of the other. Nienke won this game.

Then we went on with Therapy. We don’t play this often as it’s best with five or six and it gets out of hand, time-wise, very quickly. The game part of it is a bit long winded, but the conversations this leads to are awesome.

For the game you move around a board with psychiatric sofas trying to be the first one to get the six coloured pins in it. This would make the bed a bed of nails, so I don’t know if it would be very comfortable for a therapy session though…

To move you roll two dice, and then go forward, the square you land on tells you what to do next. This can be a question, and a right answer gets you a pin. Or it can be a question/wait square where you pick whether you want a question or stop your turn. Careful with picking the question here though, if you answer wrong you end up with a psychosis.

Other options are fantasy, where you have to answer a question about a Rörschach test kinda picture, or therapy. Depending on the number of players, this is group therapy or single therapy. If you land on a square in the same colour as one of the player sofas, you go into therapy with that player. If it is an unused colour, you go into therapy with all the other players. The therapist then asks a question (all questions are about the player) from the therapy cards, and the player writes down their answer. The therapist then says what he thinks the player answered, with reasoning. In Group therapy, all the therapists declare what they think the player answered and then come to a mutual answer. If the therapist was right, he wins a pin.

The therapy is the part I love most about the game, it leads to very interesting conversations about how you see each other, how others see themselves and what everyone would and wouldn’t do.

(Reviewy bit is over 😀)

This is what we did for the rest of the evening really, interspersed with more general chatting and eating and drinking and some picture taking.I got awesome presents as well. Ingrid gave me the Boyzone CD Brother. I was a major fan of them in my teens, and even though it has mellowed, I still like their music. They’re special to me because they were quite important to me then, so I do always want the physical CDs they release instead of just downloading it.

Mellien gave me a children’s book I wanted, a favourite I read many times as a kid. Eva gave me something from her and Juut together, a set of iron cutlery, made by Juut himself! It’s totally awesome! It’ll come in handy when we go re-enacting again 🙂 Pictures of this, and other birthday stuff to come along later, btw.

Ingrid stayed over and after Nienke had gone home too we got to talking about (among other things) Warcraft, so I showed her some things about the game, and explained stuff. She ended up with a better idea of what I do when I play and what I like about it. It was nice to share something that I like a lot, with one of my friends who’s not normally into that kind of thing.

Sunday morning I got up ridiculously early at 8:30 (not smart when you go to bed around 02:00…) cause I told my dad to pick me up around 9:00. This so there’d be more than enough time, once we got to the parents’ place, to prep for the family coming that afternoon and evening. I was gonna make a cake (hmmmm cheesecake), but decided against it as mom had an extra cake and we would’ve had too much. This meant I had extra time, and I could’ve (really should’ve) gone to bed for an hour or two longer. But I didn’t. I left Ingrid at Nienke’s for a cuppa while me and all my crap headed over to Parentville.

Had some time in the morning and early afternoon to play some WoW and mess with the Blog (I played with the layout and contents of the 101 list at the top) before the first people showed up. After that it was mostly very busy, very gezellig and very fun.I got two book gift cards, some money, very pretty and lovely scented shower gel and a drawing and a written piece by my two young second cousins 🙂

From my parents I got a book, in two parts, about the excavations in Midlaren, where I was working the second half of 2004. During the summer with the actual excavation, and from August to December with the washing, drawing and cataloging of the finds.

After the last ones left, I basically rolled into bed exhausted. All my energy was gone (that’s what lots of people for a prolonged period does to me, I’m a major introvert). It’s not back yet either. It didn’t help very much I had to work today, which, by necessity, has more people too 😀

Bought some candy to treat my teammates at work with, and made it through the day without too much trouble. Although I did start to notice, half way through the day, that the cold I’ve been seeing at the horizon for a few days has hit home. My nose is stuffed and my energy regeneration is down to half strength 🙁

Scheduled for a full work day tomorrow, but gonna see if I can get off early. Need to sleep some more, and a half day off tomorrow along with Wednesdays usual freedom it should see me through the worst of it.

It’s 00:42 now, it’s my birthday 😀 Got the first congratulatory text message, from Gert, at 00:04, nice timing 😀

And with that I will say goodbye, and good night.

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*Mierenneuken as we say means fucking ants, literally. It can also be said as mierenneuker which is to a person, as it means antfucker. It’s English counterpart would be nitpicking.