rachael's birthday

31/1/15

 Today I have to wish Rachael a happy 23rd birthday!!

Lots of the events of today happened as a result of it being Rachael's birthday, but I will get to those in a minute.  After morning meeting, we started our jobs for the day.  I was on cleaning bathrooms... yayyy.. We helped Katrina with stock take of the shop for January by counting the postcards in cupboards (omg we have over 6,000 postcards).

Ana made lunch at 12:30.  She had prepared nachos and pizza bread. I had to teach her how to make nachos because she had never made them before.  They turned out really well!

After lunch and lunch clean up, we had 'Snow Patrol' at 2 pm.  Snow Patrol is when all the volunteers who are working, meet up with Migue and clean up the walkways and carpark areas of snow.  We spend most of the time chipping away at the ice.  Today we focused on the path from the Main Chalet to Stockli, and the car-park between Main Chalet and Spycher.

Rachaels friend's, Alice and Annie, arrived on the 2:54 bus.  They were staying with us for a couple of days to visit Rachael.  Rachael had requested 2 things for her birthday - to play party games (preferably a treasure hunt) and a rainbow cake.  At 3:30 we met in the kitchen of Stockli for the first of those two requests - the treasure hunt.  Sarah had prepared a treasure hunt which took us all over the Chalet, from the freezer (where the clue was frozen in a bucket of ice) to the Main Chalet attic eaves.  Eventually the clues lead to the flag pole which was where our final treasure was hidden. Sarah had buried the treasure two days before... and quite a bit of snow had fallen since then.  Rachael had to dig out the treasure with a snow shovel.  Inside was our 'bounty' and the birthday hat for Rachael to wear.

 

Finding the clues in the attic

 

Digging out our 'bounty'!

After we found our 'bounty', we headed back to Stockli for cake! It was definitely a team effort for the cake though - Ana had made the batter, Katrina had made the butter cream to cover and put inside the cake and I made the plastic (fondant) icing decorations on the top.  It was a rainbow cake, as requested, with the feminist symbol and '23', again as requested!  Rachael got very excited about the fact I had found the feminist symbol all by myself and that the cake was a rainbow.  Well as rainbow as we could get with our limited resources.  

Dinner was Cottage pie with Peaches and Cream for dessert.  We didn't start cooking until late and for a while we were worried that the meal would be late.  But in the end we were on time; as per tradition, we got out the pots and pans and the tea cozies.  We had previously decided that we would sing before dinner instead of before dessert, because Rachael wouldn't be expecting it then!  During dinner it started to snow heavily.  Katrina, Sarah and I decided that we would complete another 2 points of our staff challenge by sledding down Hohliebeweg (the Chalet hill) at night time.  It was quite a hard walk up to the top of the hill, at some points the snow was up to our waist and never below our knees when we weren't on the road.  We walked right up to the top of the hill, almost to where the restaurant. From there we sledged down to the Chalet drive way.  It was snowing quite heavily whilst we went down and there were a few times I ran into the piles of snow on the side of the road!