The Big 30!

So I am now officially in my 30s!  I feel exactly the same, or even better than the last couple of months, so i'm taking that as a good sign of things to come!

Matt was back at work on Monday, while I had a couple of extra days to laze about with the kitty cats.  I went back on Thursday, and it was so lovely to see my wonderful office buddies.  We have 2 new members of the EAL team, who are both lovely and very enthusiastic, so I know it's going to be a great year.  I'm feeling very positive about everything, which is wonderful.  It helps having had a hugely successful party last night, but more on that in a minute.

The above photo is from Matt's catch up with his good friends here.

Friday was the day that my office chose to celebrate my birthday, together with Sylvias, whose was at the end of July.  Sylvia has a white cat, and I of course, have Sooty and Snowball, so our cupcakes from the office were just perfect for a pair of crazy cat ladies!

This was a photo of the office on Thursday.  You can see just how many boxes there were that needed sorting out. It was a complete mess! 

... no more boxes by Friday lunch time! We were super organised this year!

On Saturday, we started off by going to Jamaica blue for a pastry breakfast with Matt's parents, who got back from Beijing on Thursday.  They had a wonderful time, but were very tired having done lots of sight seeing!

Then Margaret and I went to get our nails done for the party - I went for sparkly pink!

I opened my wonderful presents, and Becky came over with some gigantic 30 helium balloons, which Sooty is terrified of, poor thing.

Then it was party time.  We had booked a room in Cloud 9 bar, on the 87th floor on Jinmao Tower, one of the skyscrapers in the centre of the city.   The view is completely fabulous!

We arrived early to put up some balloons and arrange the cake, etc.

In the end, 60 people turned up, which is 30 for me and 30 for Matt - the perfect amount for a joint 30th birthday party.  It's a lot of people!  So nice to know that we have so many good friends here.

We had a fabulous magician come for a couple of hours and he was a huge success. Everyone absolutely loved him, and i'm sure he will be the talk of school tomorrow.  Several people are wanting to hire him for parties now.  He really is incredible!  This photo really sums up peoples faces and reactions...

This, by the way, is the Grand Hyatt hotel, and a 54 floor drop to the lobby below.  We discovered Cloud 9 bar nearly a year ago, while trying to find this lobby for me to take a photo of it, and now, having been to the bar at least 5 or 6 times, I finally saw it for the first time!  It made me dizzy!

Me... having had an excellent magic trick done on me...  and by the way, wearing a dress I bought when I was 19.  Still fits!  Feeling pretty smug about that!

These are just the photos I have from my office friends.  A friend from a different group bought along his camera and took loads of photos, saying to me that since i'm the photographer usually, I deserved a night off, letting someone else take photos of me!  It was very sweet of him, and i'll post some photos once I have them.

All in all though, a wonderful night.