Plays, surprise parties, and a braai

Today's picture is of my constant companions, the desk toys. These little guys are what my fingers do for most of the day. It turns out that programming is about 20% typing, 10% compiling, and 70% sitting around cogitating the mysteries of the eternities (with special focus on the mysteries of How To Fix This Bug). For the 10 and 70 percent portions, these desk toys are terribly handy. They're magnetic, and can be arranged in multiple interesting ways.

In other news, I've had a birthday. I feel slightly older. There are several funny stories associated with this, although none of them are very funny, so please keep your expectations low.

The first one starts on Wednesday, which is usually when we have DDR. My siblings had the wonderful idea of throwing me a surprise birthday party. This really was a wonderful idea, however the intial execution left something to be desired. To start with, they locked me out of my apartment. I don't know what they were thinking here. "Hey, it's his birthday, let's try and make him as furious as possible!" is a pretty near hit. Anyway, someone finally let me in, and I walked in to find Cavan and Clarissa sitting on the couches. After a few seconds, it registered that there were balloons on the floor. And dead silence. Now, I don't know about you guys, but at most surprise parties I've been to, the idea is to yell "surprise!" loudly. The purpose of this is to make the surprisee jump, burst out laughing, something. So while I figured out that I was being thrown a surprise party, it took a few seconds to sink in.

Other than that, it went well. They had lots of very good but diet-destroying candy strewn about, some fun decoration, and they actually got me something I wanted (!) as a gift. The latter is by far the most impressive. So kudos to the sibs on that one. That's also the first time anyone's actually thrown me a surprise birthday party, which also makes it fun.

Nextly, I kept getting treated to trips to the theater this past week. I went to the Three Musketeers at the Gaslight Theater in Tucson, which was hilarious. You get free popcorn, table service (pizza and burgers and things) and you get to boo the bad guys every few seconds. There's a saloon-style piano going much of the time, and the occasional sing-along. It was a ton of fun. On Thursday my little sister took me to see Arsenic and Old Lace at BYU. Other than getting a little antsy from having to actually sit still for a couple hours (I don't do "sitting still" very well unless there's a computer in front of me), it was beautifully well done and the jokes were excellently timed and performed. I was laughing through much of the production, even having heard it before. On Friday, I ran off to see a exclusive play at the Hale theater. The play was written by Ruth Hale, and was about her father. It was their first night and had a couple rough spots, but if the actors can iron those out it'll be a cute production. I took a date on that one, which was also fun.

The family did a braai for Sunday dinner, which was divine. I am a huge fan of our particular style of potato salad, and the boerewors was amazing. Hurray for South African grub! It's a pity the stuff is so bad for you (although the way we did the potato salad was actually pretty good, healthwise ... I think I'm going to try that again).

That's all I've got folks, and it's getting late.