Thoughts from a soggy mind - best served Cold

On Monday 13th August 2007 I celebrated my first birthday in Australia; my first birthday away from my family. And as Jason puts it, it’s also another milestone in the sense that it marks two decades of my existence on Earth

And it has been the best birthday I’ve ever had. For one, absence makes the heart grow fonder and every single birthday wish from family members back in Malaysia meant even more. And I’ve really been remembering that it’s my birthday partly because Sis‘ birthday card reached 3 weeks early (she just couldn’t trust Pos Malaysia) so i’ve been looking at the birthday card on my wall for 20-odd days before the day finally arrived. The card from Mum and Dad arrived a week early, too. And then, the celebrations….

I was invited to a birthday dinner on Sunday night at Unilodge - courtesy of friends over there. And when I reached…Omg. Touched beyond words. For a while I was too stunned to do anything but just stand/sit around and grin stupidly (this would repeat itself a few times, refer below) as Su Yin went flying past me once more getting things ready. The scale of the dinner! The sheer number of dishes, and some of my most favourite dishes on top of that. My all-time favourites, black bean soup and bitter gourd, followed by steamed fish, chicken, ma poh tofu, leek, and the must-have for a Chinese on his birthday: hard-boiled eggs! Many many thanks to Su Yin, Sze Huey, Wan Phei, Wei Min and Yuet Ling for preparing everything! Can’t thank you gals enough..it was indeed an unforgettable meal =)

Oh, they baked a birthday cake too! And for the 2nd time that night, I was grinning and smiling like a complete idiot when they sang the Birthday song to me..touched beyond words; and the cake looked simply beautiful.

And my appreciation goes to the guests too. Thanks Betsy, Jason, Jared, Shern Ren, and Yeam for coming. Your presence was equally important, too. Special thanks goes to Yeam for rushing to Unilodge despite just reaching Canberra after City2Surf in Sydney. And now the pics:

I don’t know if this pic does justice to the magnitude of amazement and gratitude I felt when I first saw the dishes. Even if a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, it still isn’t enough =)

Cutting my birthday cake (baked by Sze Huey & Su Yin)…you can see from my face that I didn’t really wanna cut it up =p

And that was what happened on Sunday 12th August, the eve of my birthday. Came back to Ursies, prepared for class on Monday (7 hours of class =S) and went to bed early. Happiness in large doses can make you tired, apparently. Particularly when you mix it with other things like gratitude, surprise and..other things (I really need to brush up on my vocab!).

My birthday proceeded like any normal Monday, bar the influx of SMSes. My lab in the afternoon finished early so all in all it was a better Monday afternoon than usual It was at night that things got abit hairy..starting from dinner time. I had explicitly warned Jared not to do it but I forgot about Jason- he told me that Barney wanted to speak to me so I went to see him (we were sitting at different tables). One look at Barney’s surprised expression told me I’m in deep shit. And yes, that split second prevented me from stopping Jason from announcing to everyone in the dining room that it was my birthday. Impeccable timing, i must say =p So…everyone joined in and amidst the singing I could hear Jared’s shout of "He’s blushing!!" while I stood and looked around grinning stupidly (again).

At about 9.30pm Chern came to my room and told me that something went wrong with the Malaysian recipe that I had passed to him- apparently the chef couldn’t understand it. But I was on MSN at that time AND he looked suspicious. So i played for time and finally, i decided to give in and followed him to his room. The coast looked clear though, we were alone in the living room. But as I found out in a minute, they don’t give Senior Residents a two-room flat and a storage closet for nothing. Nearly had a heart attack when so many people burst out of nowhere! Poor Jared and Lawrence were squashed in the storage closet for a good 15 minutes =p Many Ursies were there - thanks for coming! While I was still recovering from shock they sang Happy Birthday to me and so I sat and grinned stupidly (doesn’t this sound familiar by now?)

(L-R): Birthday card from Sis, Mum and Dad, Unilodge friends, Ursies, Wei Min.

As 12am showed on my alarm clock, signaling the end of my birthday, I pored over the past 30 hours or so. It had been amazing.

Many thanks once again for all you’ve done to make this such a memorable birthday for me; I appreciate every single thing, even the smallest detail

p/s: A note of gratitude to all of you who sent me birthday greetings either via SMS, MSN, Friendster comments or wrote on my Facebook wall. I really appreciate them!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.