My really real birthday (I)

my dears, for what a week it has been. The very next day after my last blog my wife was acting very queer indeed. It was my birthday of course, and although she had never done anything like it before I had begun to suspect that she might be organizing a surprise party. The upshot of it all was that by the time work had finished on the Wednesday I was certain that there was a surprise party and I was going to it now, and lordy had all of this figuring-out, guessing-about and assuming-the-best given me a thirst. What a difference fifteen minutes makes. By five past 8 I was walking home from work with a mate of mine and slowly coming to the realization that it wasn’t to be. By ten past 8 I was telling him, in elaborate detail, about how I had been expecting a surprise party and had built myself up so much that I was now rather disappointed, the suggestion came about that we should have a birthday beer then anyways, and by 8:15 we had walked in on the surprise party that I had convinced myself wasn’t going to happen. I had run the full gamut of beer-centric, beer-loving emotions, from the loftiest brewed-malt-beverage anticipation to the usually-much-much-much-later-in-the-evening ‘trying to make oneself understood’ explanation of ‘what I really meant’, back up to the upswept, unalloyed hedonism that only free flowing frosty-draught-beverage, a table of fruit platters, cheese, crackers, olives, prawns, crab, calamari, cuttlefish (no, that’s not a type-o), pizza, chicken and all of your best mates, and all on somebody else’s bill, can bring about. even if your wife is the person picking up the bill (or so I thought at the time).As it turned out, it was the best night out for a seriously long time. Friends, food and drink in abundance, followed by singing room and soju. And upon checking the digital camera the following early afternoon, when I awoke in seven distinctly different shades of hungover (oh! Blessed mercy, sacred and wonderful 2pm starts), I discovered that we had also been to a ‘soju and fishbread’ tent and it had snowed for the first time since last march. I left the house at about half past midday and went to a public bathhouse on the way discovering that it had in fact snowed last night just as the photos of me and a few mates being snowed on had suggested.