Karina's Party And The Rest Of The Weekend

On Friday evening at 7pm, Karina's eighteenth birthday party commenced. She had put clever signs up everywhere saying things like "This Door Leads To Hell" and "If Shit Happens, Call My Mum On This Number." She had a massive vase filled with glowsticks for everyone to use. She had rented a black light and a mini strobe. It was quite exciting.

So at first it was just me and Karina and Eva, and we were actually quite content that way, but soon people started arriving. As tends to happen at parties. Thrills were had at the way white clothing lit up under the UV light. Leo wore his Ghostbusters jumpsuit. Nandita had fantastic fluorescent orange tights.

Fast forward a couple of hours. Alex, Jennecca and myself were celebrating the conclusion of our media ordeal in Karina's brother's bedroom. The door was closed, as we were having a "serious talk", while everyone else banged on the door and clamoured at the window on the other side of the room, and yelled about coming in, basically acting like a pack of zombies. That's when we realised that the door was mysteriously stuck... and that none of us could open it. I tried, and then the door handle came off. Alex was hysterical. She cried. (Let me just add that she wasn't in her usual frame of mind!) Then Leo came tumbling through the window, which was an incredible feat -- okay, I've climbed through that window before, but I was completely sober... so he staggered to his feet and despite our belief that he had come to help us, he was also shocked to learn that we were locked in. Which begs the question, why did he climb through the window? Did he feel left out?

So anyway, then Bridget climbed through the window. I don't think she knew we were locked in either, I reckon she just went to where the commotion was. I vaguely remember Jennecca shouting, "GET OUT, YOU'RE STEALING ALL OUR OXYGEN!" It truly was like a zombie invasion.

Apparently Renee or Carl came to the rescue by jiggling something in the hole where the handle used to be, and we poured out like prisoners being released. And that concludes the story of The Time We Got Stuck In A Room.

The rest of the party went really well, and when everyone had ditched and gone to Zac's or something, Karina and I ate all the leftover sausage rolls, brushed our teeth, and went to bed. The next morning we surfaced earlyish and began the cleanup/breakfast process. There was a slight problem with a lack of eggs -- due to an incident the night before in which Jono opened the fridge too vigorously and broke all of them -- so that was resolved by Renee, Laurielle and Alex going to Foodtown in their bedraggled morning-after states, complete with onesies and mugs of coffee. Oh, and there was also a mysterious stain on the ceiling, which caused Karina's mother much distress! We still don't know what it was.

So then at 12 I met Alex and Jennecca at BurgerFuel in town for a dissection of the night's events and an awesome lunch, and that's all that really happened on Saturday...

Sunday was my cousin Roy's 16th family birthday party so I helped out all day preparing for that. I made this double-layered dark chocolate cake with chocolate ganache, and set out the lollies and chips in the bowls, (I love doing that!), and basically acted as kitchen assistant to my folks. The food was a-ma-zing that night, including crème caramel made by my auntie Suzie, a pot roast made by my father, and of course my cake. A select few at school can testify to the tastiness of the latter!

Then as we were sitting around talking, the subject of careers came up, and the question came up, "if you could start over, what job would you want to do?" Obviously this was aimed at all the adults.

My uncle Chris said he would have been a musician. "Probably playing the keyboard, synth... back in the 70s, that prog rock scene..." It makes perfect sense as he's always been passionate about collecting and listening to music. He has hundreds of LPs, CDs and mp3s.

Julie only had one thing to say, "Not teaching!" Whereas my mum said she would have done just the same (bless her, I knew she would say that), though probably getting into specialist classroom teaching earlier.

Suzie said she would have been a vet. I'm not at all surprised. She has always been an animal lover. Currently they have two golden retrievers and two cats, and there have been many other animals before. She would have been an excellent vet.

My dad's answer was the one that surprised me and interested me the most. He said he would have liked to do something with his hands, like being a cabinetmaker or doing restoration or something. I never would have thought. It's such a far cry from teaching geography.

It really made me think about my own future. I realised that my ambitions are so huge but I must pursue them, because I don't want to go down a path that diverges so far from my original passions. I don't mean to say that I think my parents and aunties and uncle have wasted their lives or chosen the "wrong" careers, at all. I just don't want to reach that stage of my life and be able to say I wished I could have done something else. I suppose I mean I'd like to have the same feeling about my career as my mum does for hers. That would surely be an accomplishment.