bring on year 24!!!

"happy birthday to me.
happy birthday to me.
happy birthday dear me-eeeeeeeee.....
happy birthday to me!"

(it's mary's birthday tomorrow so we're sharing a birthday toast on the left.)

so technically it was yesterday (well actually, technically technically it is today since i was born in america and in america, it was march 20 today), but who has time to blog on their birthday? actually i totally had time, but i had so many birthday e-mails, facebook messages, and phone calls to reply to (i felt SO LOVED!!! thanks for that to all who remembered...). here were some of the cool things about my 24th:

• talking to katie and dena and my parents on the phone! (gotta love skype)
  
• getting an i-tunes gift certificate (brilliant) from kristin, grant, tricia, jen, and andrew. thanks guys! can't wait to go music shopping!
  
• walking into the doors of tango pango to be bombarded by 19 sets of arms grabbing my legs and screaming "happy berday calolyn!!! calolyn is or berday!!!"
  
• getting 19 very artistically decorated birthday cards from those same sets of arms with very intense efforts of writing "happy birthday carolyn" that looked something like "hajky bfetday canaiyn." or in some cases, just "~~__`>c~~_" or something like that.
  
• a gift from a friend who was traveling through india that included a little brass bottle of holy water from the ganges river. how many people get holy water for their 24th birthday? not many i bet. thanks ali!
• taking a beautiful walk through lake park (it was 60 degrees and sunny yesterday) with debbie as the sun went down.
  
• and to finish the night, hanging out with matt and mary and wicket (their dog) for drinks at the GS (a little convenient store type thing in our courtyard where people often sit outside on little plastic chairs around little plastic tables--very classy) and lots of laughs.
• getting a big can of fruit cocktail as a birthday gift at about 1 am from my security gaurd mr. kong, which you can see in this picture on the bottom right. definitely the strangest gift i recieved this year.

so all in all, a great birthday! we're celebrating saturday night in the city with a big birthday bash b/c mary's birthday is tomorrow and our friend lydia's birthday is this week as well, so the celebrating has only just begun! (birthdays can be so exhausting...)