Happy Birthday!

I had this as my FB profile pic for a
while, and Chad's friends who don't
know me kept asking if Denise was his
wife. I changed the pic.

My brother and sister have birthdays so close together it should be illegal. My parents didn't do it on purpose, but these two have holiday-ish birthdays while I'm way off on the other side of the year.

Not that I am complaining.

Anyway! My delightful, charming, lovely baby sister, variously known as Denise, Neesee, Hermanita (I'm the only one who calls her that), and an assortment of other nicknames, is celebrating her 28th birthday today.

Which is weird for me on a lot of levels, because in my head I have her frozen in time; she's supposed to be about 15. Or, maybe, 20. But 28? Sheesh.

She was explaining something about
the CD. Her favourite colour is
green; can you tell?

She is taller than me by a few inches, like every other member of the family, and has been since she was about 8 or 9. This has led, ever since, to people thinking I'm the younger one. When we were still teens, this annoyed me and delighted her; now that we're into late 20s/early 30s territory, we feel the opposite.

The summer that I was 19 and she was 14, we spent a week at our summer camp; I was a counselor, she was a camper. The counselors have to turn up a day early, and since it would have been silly to make two trips, we went together the day before camp began. So Denise was present for all the pre-camp stuff. Before a counselor meeting that night, one of the guys was handing round packets with information, meeting agenda, that sort of thing, and he handed one to Denise, who handed it to me. So he tried to give her another one, so she said, "I'm not a counselor."
He said, "Oh, okay," and then tried to take the packet away from me. So I told him, "No, I am a counselor, I need it."
He stood there for a minute, looking back and forth between the two of us, before I said, "I'm the older one, she's the younger one."
He asked Denise, "You aren't twins?" Now it was our turn to be confused. Denise said, "No, I'm 14 and she's 19."
He still didn't go away, but stood there for another second before he said, "Are you being serious?"
This had us and everyone standing nearby laughing. In the end, we convinced him that she was a camper and I was not.

I assure you, her head is in no danger
 of catching fire.

And one more story before I go: At my wedding, Denise was the maid of honour, and towards the end of the ceremony she had to cross the stage. Chad and I had our unity candle in more or less the same place as it is in this pic (which is from our brother Billy's wedding, not mine). Denise bumped the table as she went by, knocking over the candle. Fortunately, it went out before it hit the carpet, but not before giving everyone a fright. (Our family does not have a lot of luck with unity candles. But that's another story entirely.)

At Billy's wedding, I had done Denise's hair, with the aid of copious amounts of hairspray. So she frequently jokes that this picture makes it look like her hair is on fire, and that if she had gotten any closer, it might well have gone up in flames from all the flammable chemicals I put on it. I tell her she's better off just staying away from fire altogether.

Yep, those were some goofy stories. Happy birthday, Denise!