Le boy du birthday

It's that time of year again--time to shower the Jimmah with a massive birthday haul, make much, eat cake, and go off in search of extreme amounts of fun.

Jimmah's birthday began an evening early this year, with a night-before present in the tradition of the Christmas Eve pyjamas Bjorn and I always got. It starts the excitement early, but also relieves some of the tension in the hopes that you might actually sleep that night. I always loved it, so I thought Jimmy might, too. I presented him with the craft-store storage system I'd devised for his Heroscape dudes. Admittedly, it was a gift for me as much as for him: no more foot-piercing figurines lying around.
He happily played with his armies of vikings, Greeks, Samurai, robots, secret agents, dragons, werewolves, and kyries well into the night.
The morning of, I fixed up his current favourite breakfast (courtesy of the Lea & Perrins cookbook Heather sent for my birthday) and watched as he giddily tore into his massive stash.
Needless to say, he was thrilled to bits with all his wonderful gifties, and has played with/read/worn/drank/watched almost all of them already.

Unfortunately, duty called, so our Jim was off to the office for a hard day's work. Fortunately, his lovely and caring wife slaved over a hot grocery store all day and brought him a nice cake.
Bev (the church secretary) and I sang him happy birthday and enjoyed some chocolatey goodness. Good ol' Co-op.

Seeing as it's impossible to get more work done after one has been eating chocolate cake, Jimmy agreed to let me steal him away on an extended dinner break. After a bit of searching (the addresses in this city follow no greater organizational principle whatsoever) we found the Red Lobster that would serve up some delicious fish and chips to the birthday boy.
Work duties called once again, and so Jimmy's birthday ended with a church meeting (which took for EVER), but at least that meant the treasurer could be hassled into coughing up a paycheque. Not a bad ending to his special day.

But fear not--more festivities were on the way!

Tuesday was technically a work day, but we spent it colouring Shrinky-dinks to send out to the Sunday school kids. In the evening, we met up with Pastor Bryan and his wife Bev (not the church secretary) to catch the summer's final instalment of the Sunset Ceremony down at the ol' RCMP academy.
I'm pleased to report that these cadets were much more on the ball than the ones Mom and I saw parading last week. They have graduated to red-coat stage, which apparently means that they can march in time without tripping. Some olde tyme NWMP folk ran out, hauling a cannon
and then by a very clever rope-pulling manoeuver, stopped the thing, loaded it, aimed it, and fired it! Wooo! That was definitely the most exciting part of the ceremony, which made the rest of it kind of anticlimactic. But we still enjoyed the band and the officers marching in formation, making patterns and spinning in pinwheels.
Dance, RCMP officers, dance for our amusement! The flag-lowering ceremony provided some extremely Canadian snapshots,
but was a tad on the pathetic side, as it took place to the sound of one lone glockenspiel ting-ting-tinging The Maple Leaf Forever. In the end, it was all worth it because we caught a glimpse of what I can only assume to be the RCMP pace car
and scored some wicked paper hats.
The evening concluded with a nice trip to the pub to get to know Bev and Bryan. We just keep getting more and more comfortable here. It's dangerous how much we feel at home! My big excitement of the day came when we got home to find a message offering me my first real editing job.
Celebration time!