Happy Birthday to me

It was my first Australian birthday today. I have decided that you need to take a year off each birthday on this side of the world, not add one on. One of my ancestors did a very similar thing in relation to the Antipodes! If it was good enough for her, it's good enough for me and she got away with it.

Jeremy took over Pickle duty for the morning and left me lounging in my bed awaiting my birthday phonecall from mum and dad. We have no Internet at the moment and you know what that means. No skype, no facebook and no emails. So I didn't get to see them but it was nice to talk.

I am developing twitches and tics. I keep going to look things up on the Internet and getting as far as loading the browser before I remember. I am like a sniffer dog when it comes to wifi hotspots, I can smell them from 20 paces and I am there armed and ready with my iPad at all times! It is the only way to get through the withdrawal symptoms. I am having to write my blogs offline and then upload it when I find a hotspot. I am an Internet Nomad. No fixed Internet abode. 

Anyway, back to my birthday shenanigans. Jeremy made us breakfast on the barbecue and we ate it on the deck. How Australian was that? Even better because it is actually winter here. 

Then we went out into Brisbane CBD. Jeremy was going to buy me something shiny in Tiffany but the shop assistants did not Even acknowledge that we were in the shop so we stomped out in high dudgeon, pretty woman stylee. We stomped all the way around the corner to the Pandora shop where I had to take over the shiny shopping for two reasons. 1) Mr Pickle does not like to shop and he had reach critical mass and 2) Jeremy was taking work phone calls (on my birthday of all days and it was a Saturday). So I chose some locking beads and a peridot (birthstone) charm from Jeremy and a tiny Babooshka charm from Gran.

I was then rushed out of the shop and frogmarched to the other side of the river, my attempts to pop into the library thwarted! All the while Jeremy is taking what I thought were work calls (some were) and I am fuming thinking that this is pants on my birthday.

Little did I know that Jeremy had planned a surprise picnic for me in the Southbank parklands with Heidi, Nigel, Nicky, baby Sophie and Ewa. As we were marching to the playground I noticed a baby on the ground and thought, why is Sophie lying on the grass?All of the grownups had looked away so I wouldn't see them and then they all turned and shouted surprise. it was completely unexpected and a lovely surprise that was very well organized by Jeremy and kept secret by Mr Pickle, who for the previous two days had kept telling me that he and daddy had bought me two birthday cards and a small triangle.