Birthday Is Coming!

The Birthday Tree

Rachel and I went over to her parents' today for what turned out to be a "surprise early birthday party" for me, as they won't be able to actually see me on my birthday (this Friday).

As always Rachel's mum had gone to town on the decorations, with banners, candles and fairy lights, as well as the balloon-festooned "birthday tree" (pictured above).

Present-wise, as well as my traditional Dilbert Desk Calendar, there was a bit of a theme as you can see from the picture below:

A Song Of Ice And Fire 2013 art calendar (for the gamesroom) and the magnificent new box set of maps of "The Lands Of Ice And Fire" - which led to a very bizarre conversation with my in-laws who appeared to have no grasp of "fantasy fiction" or that maps of "made-up places" even existed!

I then went for a bit of a lie-down for an hour or so, and a chance to catch-up on the recent Star Wars Action News podcasts, then the afternoon rounded off with a delicious Batman birthday cake.

My family may not understand my fandom, but that doesn't stop them catering to it very well... and it's still several days until my actual birthday.

The only slight dampener on the weekend is that having thought all our heating woes were finally at an end, the timer for the heating and hot water packed up - so we had to revert to the immersion heater again for hot water and the bar heaters for warmth, until we can get a replacement timer (our friendly electrician is sourcing that as we speak).

But then the icing on the cake was finding out this morning - after working fine for a couple of days - that the immersion heater (the NEW immersion heater, I must stress, that was part of our major plumbing works) has decided to stop heating the water. Rachel discovered this when she jumped in the shower this morning... and promptly jumped back out again.

So tomorrow, instead of meeting up with my godson Alec and his mum, Clare, as I'd originally planned, I'm once again having to wait in for repair works to be carried out.