A birthday

Camille's eldest son turned 21 last week and had the obligatory party thrown for him. It was surprise party organised by Camille with the help of the eldest's girlfriend and cousin who kept him carefully in the dark and removed him from the premises for the day while the last preparations were made.

To the right is the lovely Camille. Not only was it a surprise party, she also decided that as her eldest had been terrified of clowns as a child that everyone should dress up as a clown so we could see if they still affected him.

When he arrived home he did say that his heart was racing and that he wasn't sure if it was because of the surprise or because of all the clowns so I guess they still have an effect.

It was a quite spread out party. A lot of it was centred around our circular driveway. Most people hung out here. The garage was cleaned up and had a professional sound system, all the fancy lighting etc and music. Inside the house was a DVD blasting out some heavier music on the big screen. Down the back of the property we had a large fire going. It's fairly traditional for the fire to happen. It's starting to chill down at night at this time of year and its very pleasant to be able to stand/sit around a huge fire while drinking.

To the right is a photo of the fire taken from the second floor of the house. It's right at the back of the property behind the pool area which may give you an indication of it's size.

I have to say that I enjoyed this part of the party the best. It's quite convivial sitting on a couple of logs around a fire at night. I slunk off to bed reasonably early but I believe the stayers were still there at 4:00am.

Around 8:00am a few of us restoked it and got some embers going and cooked potatoes in it for breakfast. It's one of the nicer ways to have potatoes. Pierced, wrapped in tinfoil and completely covered in hot embers (no flaming bits!) for about an hour. They come out with lovely crisp skin. Cut them in half and score the flesh and then place plenty of butter or sour cream (fuck the cholesterol!) on it and grind a bit of black pepper over. Absolutely lovely. We didn't bother to wash these potatoes so the skin wasn't edible. A pity as it really is good.

[edit]: I just noticed that behind Camille to her left you can just see the net camera I installed under the eaves. I set it to update every 5 seconds to the internet and to ftp the image to a storage area. Sometime in the next week I will create a timelapse of the event. Most of it is pretty dark so I'll speed those sections up.

[edit 2]: That would be Camille's right and our left!