Your university doesn't have lab coats available on the spot? Huh. Every single lab, be it an university or institute lab (mostly biology and chemistry labs), I've been to has had an entire cabinet stock full of white lab coats of all possible sizes in some corner or back room. (I, however, do own an actual lab coat due to an event which handed them out some years ago.) Well, the Tallinn University of Technology's chemistry faculty's labs actually have dark blue lab coats, for some reason ... it has been theoreticized that it makes it easier to understand whether and what exactly you managed to pour onto yourself. Considering that many - if not most - of those lab coats actually have some bright pink and bleached-white stains on them, this theory just might hold true... (White for alkali, pink for acids?)

(...Clothes shopping is a horrible thing. Not only do I find it fairly tedious, but most things are either too short or too wide or both, except for when they are too narrow (though the latter more occurs with footwear, half of which clearly haven't been made to accommodate five toes). And I think companies actually label the sizes quite arbitrarily, so what is L for one is M for another and so forth.)

Hmm... Tyah, I must say that the people who can be found at my various family members' birthdays aren't necessarily the same, save for a few... Some of my family (the not-so-young cousins especially) actually celebrates their birthdays twice: once with family, once with friends. Understandable, in a sense, what with the atmosphere and activities being different. I personally mostly ignore my own birthdays. 
(Which reminds me, I should ask my family again when my father's birthday will be celebrated ... he is out-of-country on the two weekends closest to the actual date, and a couple of days ago no one still had any idea. Makes planning a bit hard for me.)

(For some reason, your mention of age reminded me of a specific bank's handling of people's 26th birthday "Happy 26th birthday! Regrettably, you are no longer entitled to the various discounts meant for young people". Why, thanks... But eh, if my one grandmother had no problems climbing mountains in Peru in her mid-seventies and the other one is flying between Sweden and Spain and Estonia and so forth all the time, twenty-five or thirty sounds quite insignificant.)