Many dankes, mercis, and thanks to everyone with the birthday wishes. It was a sort of half and half day, all things considered.
First of all, the Grown-Ups insisted on coming up. I suppose in the long run the Grown-Ups are not all that bad. They're just not really the ones I wish I had. I wish I had psychic but cool Grown-Ups: that they could read my mind and be totally OK with anything they came across. I think we all wish for Grown-Ups like these, but very few of us have the best of both worlds.
As it is, my mother makes me crazy because she is paranoid. Well, over-cautious. I suppose it's because she keeps dealing with people who screw her over: the companies she has worked for, her husband, etc. but it's very trying when she assumes the worst for absolutely everything.
My father, well, there's nothing so much bad about him as he's just not a very good counter to my mother. Rather than make her influence less, it becomes moreso. The two of them cannot be in the same room without at least four or five strained words. They're still together because neither one of them knows what they would do without the other.
It's a miracle I turned out even semi socially acceptable, really.
So they came and my mother tried to be very nice which ended up irritating me. She has a knack for picking the nice thing that you don't want done for you and doing it. This would've been slightly more bearable if Nathan hadn't been at work all the morning. He got off work the same time the Grown-Ups went home.
He wanted to know what I wanted to do for my birthday. The honest answer to that was: other than him, nothing. He did get me the Extended ROTK which I have lusted after since it came out but have not had the money for. Seriously, I would have gone without food to buy that DVD, but I haven't even had the money with which I could have gone without food. Lucky thing he has bigger paychecks than I do.
He also really wanted me to do something that would actually make it seem like I had a birthday. I had no desire to do either of the two big final things that become legal for me this year (I mean, I suppose I wouldn't have minded much renting a car, but then, what would I do with it?) So, since I wouldn't drink or gamble, he wanted me to at least make the cake.
A few days prior to the birthday, I had bought all the stuff to make myself a cake- from scratch. I wanted to see if I could do it. I had planned to do it during the time the Grown-Ups ended up showing up. So, obviously that was out. By the time I had time, I was too tired and worn out from being nice to the Grown-Ups. I didn't really want to try a recipie I have neither attempted nor seen attempted.
I forgot to mix the butter and sugar together. Instead, I added the sugar to the flour, baking powder and salt. This meant that when I added eggs, I added them to the sugar, and the flour and the baking powder and the salt. For those of you who know anything about baking, you will know that I was totally screwed when I got to the part that read "alternately add dry ingrediants and milk to liquids".
The result? A rather sweet frosted bread. The home-made frosting turned out pretty good though (it's hard to screw up powdered sugar, butter, and an egg). It's the colour green of a McDonald's St. Patrick's mint shake, but other than that it's good. We put 21 candles in and I wished something along the lines of never having another birthday quite like this and went to bed shortly after.
So, it wasn't terrible, but it just wasn't what I'd wish for either. I think I'm going to feed the rest of the cake to the Box Office staff/Theatre Management class. I'll let them stop eating it if they can guess what I did wrong.