birthday flood

Today is my twenty-fourth birthday. It's also Walpurgis Night, and Student Moving Day (Michelle and Scott have a new apartment today, and our next door neighbours moved out, and Sean's boss is moving into an apartment upstairs), and the one-year anniversary of leaving for Mexico.
How do you celebrate a birthday? Well, I slept in, and then wandered downstairs to have a bagel with cream cheese and a coffee - something Sean and I used to do once upon a time when we had money for $4 bagels all the time (I don't know when that was, but I know it happened). Sean had to work, sadly, so I brought a book instead and listened to the good people of Fredericton discuss the coming flood. The commenters on the various CBC articles about the flood are all very upset that the government isn't sending in the troops, but the actual residents of downtown are pretty blase about the whole thing. We received little emergency booklets in the mail today, which is apparently to help us deal with not having the walking path by the river available to us.
Around lunchtime I headed back upstairs and was just settling into a good afternoon of knitting when Sean turned up early with flowers:

And a cake (pictured gently used):

And the afternoon off, having banked some hours. Yay!
We passed a quiet afternoon doing not very much (except eating cake) and had a delicious maple curry for supper before heading out into the disaster zone that is Fredericton for a walk. As CBC seems to suggest that we might have our power cut off to prevent flood + electricity issues, we picked up some candles, but honestly, I'm not that worried. We may have to apply for some sort of emergency funding to feed us fast food if we have no cooking apparatus for a few days, but there are worse things.
On our walk we noticed a huge amount of traffic, really too much for the time of day (when we got home, I noticed that Gail's blog says the Princess Margaret bridge is inaccessible, which is probably why downtown was choked with commuters at 7:30 pm). Also, a little dog ran out into traffic, which made me panic until he made it across the very busy street and onto the side where we were waiting for the world's slowest walk light. I started to walk down to check him for tags, but a businesswoman ran over and scooped him up. We kept waiting, and she walked by with the little dog in her arms and asked us if we knew where he belonged.
"I'm terrified of dogs," she explained, "but I just couldn't stand it. I don't know if he's going to bite me, or rip up my car..."
The dog was licking her ear and was pretty content to be held, so I think she'll be fine.
We picked up some batteries and candles, and headed home via the suburbs, coming out near Brunswick St, which turned out to be having some flood issues of its own:
The water was bubbling up through the grates onto the street. I've seen it do this before - two years ago I lived in the house down the road, just visible with the red roof - but they had to close the road. This SUV didn't seem to appreciate that, though, and barreled on through:

We ran into Amy the Pirate and her dog Guinness (Stu's roommates) and also Sean's boss Mike - absolutely everyone is out for walks to see the flooding and enjoy the spring. The word the scientists tend to use for our flood is "the freshet", and I think it's a nice word for it. Whatever the news says, it certainly doesn't feel like a disaster.
So here we are back at home. We're planning to go back out later and walk to the Diplomat to have some deep-friend wonton skins that I've been craving (on birthdays you get a bonus Point for every year you have been alive) and we'll probably see Megan there, but this is pretty much it.
Except, of course, the internet. People like to talk about how cheap communication has become with all this technology as though it's a bad thing, but there's something great about getting up and having eight or nine Facebook messages wishing you a happy birthday, from people who probably wouldn't remember except for the internet reminding them , and seeing most of my family wishing me a happy birthday in their MSN line. It's a good feeling.
Oh right. Here's a picture of me, though you still can't see my hair - I'll get Sean to take a picture from an angle where you can see the blue and green:

And to finish off this dispatch, what comes with bouquets of gorgeous flower? Tulle for the kitties! Picture here stalking the plastic wrap that also came with the bouquet of flowers, which she seems to have chosen as her favoured enemy.