Balloons make your hands smell funny.

...as I found out today when I helped set up for a surprise birthday party, and I had to tape balloons to the walls... afterward I smelled my hand for some odd reason, and it had this weird smell which hadn't been there at all before I had been handling all those balloons.  So yeah... balloons make your hands smell funny.

But yeah, today was kind of busy toward the later end, since I went to the murder mystery/spaghetti date night thing at the Institute building at 5:00 and then Katie's birthday party around 7:00.  The spaghetti thing actually went pretty well; there were a few different possibilities that I was worried about (getting matched up with someone I couldn't stand, bad food, the murder-mystery thing being too confusing or disruptive of the date part) but it turned out that none of those happened!  I actually didn't end up being paired up with a total stranger like I was expecting; instead my date ended up being Julie, one of the several girls I met when everyone was locked up in the gym after the bomb threat happened.  We had lots of random stuff to talk about, and also ended up talking with one of the other couples at the table a bit (except they were an actual couple, since they were engaged!) The food was good, too; the spaghetti was real edible spaghetti (where you get some spaghetti on your plate and then add the sauce on top) and not the "noodles and sauce all mashed up together before serving" cafeteria-food junk, the salad had giant croutons, and there were also breadsticks and cake.  Nothing but water to drink, but surprisingly even that sort of worked.  The murder-mystery part was kinda entertaining as well, since the people playing the suspects all did these really goofy accents and walked around visiting people's tables occasionally so we could ask them questions (and then a few times they all got up in front of the room and gave their "clues," since nobody had enough time to get around to all of the tables.)  It turned out that it was the guy announcing everyone else who did it, rather than any of the actual suspects. XD

After that I went to a surprise birthday party for Katie (who I know mainly because she sits right behind me in Spanish class... wasn't expecting to get invited to her birthday party, but one day in lunch this guy came over to my table and passed me an invitation out of nowhere.)  This is when I found out that balloons make your hands smell funny, of course.  Also watched I Am Legend (which was on a laptop and the volume was too low to hear what anyone was saying unless they were yelling at the time... so basically Will Smith's only line in the movie, as far as I could hear, was "DAMN!"), ate some random snack food (including a cake that looked like a giant cookie!) and generally goofed off for a while.

Also found out that Ruth's car is repaired (new radiator!), so I'll be volunteering at the Boxerwood nature park place for a few hours tomorrow.  I think Ruth mentioned that she was giving someone else a ride also, but I can't remember who... guess I'll find out tomorrow.  But yeah, I'm not entirely sure what I'll be doing over there but it should be a good way to pass some time, see stuff, and get some of those service hours out of the way (I've already got six down, so two or three more should put me pretty close to the end!)