Birthday

I aged another year. 36 is aooarently a moderately interesting birthday here, as it means it's the same zodiac year as when I was born. In other words, I'm a tiger, and it's the year of the tiger. Seems a flimsy excuse to celebrate, but flimsy excuses are better than no excuses.

Spent Saturday at work. hardly exciting, but useful, as i tend to spend money on things like food, rent, and toothpaste (need to buy toothpaste, preferably mildly offensive toothpaste, later today).

At night, a friend came by to cook. Of course, being a female friend of mine generally means you can't cook, so I cooked for us and a roommate.

After that, went to Friends Bar. A night of drinking was planned, but kind of derailed by Karen. her gift to me was to buy tickets for some wargaming thing Sunday. She didn't think to ask the time, which led to us having to be there at 8:30 on Sunday. Good news for my liver, as most people opted for the simpler "let me buy you a beer/shot for your birthday" plan. Kudos to Robert for successfully making Dr pepper using booze.

Sunday started early. Karen popped up to make sure i could get there. coincidentally, she arrived hungry as i was cooking. Christ says to feed the hungry. he never said there'd be paintball involved as a result. More people probably would if he had.

Due to her expert guidance and detailed knowledge of her hometwon, we arrived only 25 minutes late, missing most of the safety demonstrations and other useless nonsense. We were not there too late for the pre-shooting activities:

first, climb a tower about 7 meters high. Once there, jump out and catch a trapeze bar. This does require a harness, as most missed the bar. This was awkward, as I am deathly afraid of heights. Climbing up 20 feet or so seems like torture to me, much less leaping out into the air. having travelled with me and been on mountains and cable cars, karen is well aware of this, so she set out to explain the problem. Or rather, tell the guy in charge i was too fat and would probably not be able to climb up. I can recognize shameless manipulation when i see it, so I'm not sure how i wound up on top of the thing. Making the leap was easier for me than for some I guess in that I did it with insane laughter, while some cried.

Next up was wargames. Well, not exactly the wargame part. More like dividing into teams and choosing a captain. This was followed by choosing a name, a slogan, and a competition to see who could sing revolutionary songs better. I was at a slight disadvantage, in that I had never heard most Chinese revolutionary songs before, but really, it was a slight disadvantage, as no one else seemed to know any either. Once my suggestion i teach Clash songs was rejecte, i kind of tuned out.

next up would be the killing, except it was lunch time. karen has a slight speech problem, in that she told the team I'm a good cook, so i wound up doing about half the cooking. Inexplicably, I was able to give good advice on fish steaming. I have never cooked a fish in my life. the veggie stuff was ok.

After lunch and a brief nap, our fearless band headed over to the staging area, where we .... played some sort of game that involved standing is a circle spouting gibberish. losers were required to sing songs mocking their own posteriors. I swear every word of that is true.

from there, we moved to place involving an odd balance challenge. trying to move the entire tema through a filed stepping on little stones and not touching the ground. Karen has unusually small hands and feet. I'm about 8 inches taller than her and don't have unusually small feet. She thought this was challenging. I may have used bad words more than once.

next we headed over to the building where the guns were stored. we went there to use the rope tied toa tree to o something where you need to swing the team from a platform to a tire. First step was getting the rope, which was hanging in the middle. I suggested we tie our shoelaces together and tie them to a shoe, then swing the shoe until it cathes on the rope and pull it in. karen refused to translate, as it was a dumb idea. which in the end is what we did. Uncoordinated people + rope swing=comedy gold. The easiest thing to do was have someone lift people up on the rope, then they get flung acroos, where someone on the other sidecatches the rope and they hop down. This leads to the tallest and strongest person needing to swing over near the end, when the tire is packed full of people. My first attempt was not too different from bowling

Finally, we went out on the field and shot each other. Being the biggest target leads to getting shot a bit. Karen earned a timeout by removing her mask, and we both got one for shooting our team. repeatedly. in her case, at close range. I at least had the decency to snipe at her from behind a tree for a while. In the end, we lost at capture the flag, which i believe is because the team rejected my suggestion that we dig trenches and scrounge for barbed wireOr maybe it was that the other team had a few cops and our team was mostly salesman. Or maybe the ammo we wasted shooting each other would have been better spent onthe other side. Who knows.

So, 8:30 -5:30 had roughly an hour of actual fighting, and I got to cook three times for other people, including a group of ten. it was a lot of fun, though k was worried I'd be annoyed by all the non-shooting stuff. She took me out to dinner, and continued her amazing streak of choosing awful restaurants. Do not ever go with her to try somewhere new. I think she was served cat food.

The highlight of that day? Going to sleep around 8:45 at night