Rowan Tree and Red Thread

I was at our neighbours place on Monday for their son's 4th birthday party. There was a gang of kids there, and Rowan got rather lost in the crowd a couple of times. She enjoys having other kids about but she's not really at the stage where she'll throw herself into a group and start playing with them. Parallel play seems safer to her, I think.

She did seem to enjoy it all, though perhaps not as much as I did. Towards the end of our stay Sam and I got out into the garden where we were caught up with some of the older kids (5 and 6 years old, I'd guess) who dragged us immediately into their bizarre pirates fantasy. I was promptly cut into pieces as the kids, mostly girls, chopped me up with rubber swords, plastic toy cutlasses and, oddly, a foam-rubber pistol.

Despite my lack of limbs I managed to bound free and was happily pursued about the garden by short, screaming people. My ruse of flying to Bermuda at one point gave them pause, as I told them they couldn't bring weapons through immigration and customs. I was foiled however, by one clever girl who told me she'd "already been to Mermuda (sic), and killed everybody there, so there was no customs officers." Well that told me. I dutifully submitted to a second dismemberment.

After that the tickling started and I had my revenge. Bwa-hahaha!

I work in a university, in the science building, a multi-storey testament to ugly 60s concrete architecture. We have a lot of fire alarms here. Recently it seems to be running at one a week, with nothing to blame for the alarms but the white hot heat of science. That or toasters.

I hope no one else suffers from the lack of fire fighters while they're here responding to another false alarm.