Tag: birthday

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I’m 36 for really real now!

Honestly, my brain kinda glazed over being 35. That has nothing to do with my state of consciousness in the last year or how many donuts I’ve eaten since last October 19th, but it never quite sank in. I remember bowling with a group of people this summer and one girl was sure she was the oldest one there. I disagreed, then said I was 36. “Well, I’m turning 36 in a couple months…”

Maybe it’s because part of me thinks 62 is cooler than 7 x 5—I’ve got a little bit of math geek in me—but it feels like I’ve been attached to 36 for a long time instead of embracing the entirety of age 35. As things stand, here I am, not dead yet, but getting older every second. The only consolation I can think of at the moment? I don’t have to worry about remembering “in a couple months” anymore.

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And God’s birthday present is…

My older brother Brent works the night shift, so he called us while driving home at 8:00 this morning to declare that it’s 39 degrees on his 39th birthday. 39 degrees on January 9th in Minnesota. We haven’t had any sub-zero temperatures yet this winter. We are getting spoiled rotten and as soon as it gets back to normal weather conditions around here, I can only imagine how much people will be bitching about the cold and snow…

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Another year closer to the grave

Unless I have myself cremated, in which case I’m closer to… wherever I have my remains dumped. (Preferably not on my parents’ carpet.)

Being 35 doesn’t feel like a very special age, but at the moment, it does feels like the starting line to a very speedy race. I’ve got two online exams to take by 11:55 tonight, class tomorrow night, dinner with friends on Friday, a request/offer from a friend to help behind the scenes on a movie over the weekend, the rest of the week to prepare for and take another two online exams and then the final exam on Thursday the 27th, getting on a bus to Chicago at 12:05am on Friday, having fun at HalloweeM with a bunch of Mensa folks (See how they made that letter switch? Pretty clever, huh?), then coming home on Sunday just in time for arthroscopic knee surgery on Monday morning.

There are a lot of unknowns in there, mostly about whether I’ll be prepared for the exams and what (if anything) the surgeon will find when scoping my knee. I’ve played soccer a couple times since talking to the doc—he said it was one of my three options, so why not?—and I haven’t collapsed screaming in pain, so that’s been nice. I can also tell there’s something in the back that still doesn’t feel right, which is not so nice.

So yeah, that’s the next two weeks summed up in one long run-on sentence and I’m glad I could type it all out. Had I tried to say it instead, I might have run out of oxygen and been a lot less than one year closer to the grave.

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Golden boy for a day

Just wanted to wish my little brother Justin a happy 31st birthday! For those who don’t know what a “golden birthday” is, use the day of the month you were born: he was born on January 31st, so he’s celebrating his golden birthday at age 31 today. My birthday is October 19th, so mine was when I turned 19.

I was going to say that he’s as old as someone can get before reaching their golden birthday, but if you were born on February 29th and Leap Year happens once every four years, you probably won’t get to celebrate yours because you’ll be dead. So… yeah. Like I said, happy birthday, Justin!

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Interesting proportions

My family has trouble getting together. Lots of schedule conflicts, people running in circles… probably not that much different than other families, really, but we still like to meet at a restaurant to celebrate birthdays, although it’s usually for more than one of us at a time because of said schedule conflicts. My birthday was October 19th and my party ended up scheduled to be in November. We picked a time and place to meet and had everything all planned out. Unfortunately, the snowstorm that hit the cities that afternoon didn’t care about our plans. So much for my birthday party.

I mention all that because Justin and Molly got back from the Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge last weekend and we still haven’t partied for my sake. We all met at Brent and Gail’s today to party for Santa’s sake, but not mine. However, Justin followed through with his offer to buy my birthday present while in Abu Dhabi and it’s pretty sweet.

There are two gifts and one is… I’m assuming it’s sweet, given that it’s a small bag of Arabian Delights brand “Chocodates”. Description on the front of the bag: “choco-date with almond”. My favorite part, though, is how the back of the bag lists protein, carbohydrate, fat and “energy” (in kilocalories and kilojoules).

The second gift is thoroughly awesome. It’s a polyester long sleeve “Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge” shirt (logo on the upper left part of the chest). Across the back reads “Abu Dhabi” and the right shoulder has “Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority” printed on it in both English and Arabic. I started wearing the shirt as soon as I opened up the wrapping even though the tags were still hanging down at the bottom.

I finally cut the tags off when I got home tonight and took a closer look. It’s a Salomon-brand shirt made in Cambodia and sold in Abu Dhabi, which helps explain why the little “Warranty & Glossary” booklet has two small pages of information written in 28 different languages: English starts on page 2 and a southeastern Asian language ends on 59.

There’s also a tag that lists the size, etc. Not out of the ordinary—it describes the shirt as black and made in Cambodia—but it also says “T-SHIRT (SHORT SLEEVE) L”. That’s right, short sleeve. Out of all the shirts I own, this is one of the few that can reach my wrists when my arms are fully extended, so if this is “short sleeve”, I can only imagine what a long sleeve shirt made by these people would look like.

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A quarter century and counting

Today was Jeremy Gustafson’s 25th birthday party. Two days ago, I also thought that today was supposed to bring freezing rain and seriously hazardous road conditions. Normally, that wouldn’t be a big deal, although there wouldn’t be as many guests at the party, but that doesn’t account for the last few years when his birthday has brought heavy snow, ice and pretty much everything but frozen gerbils falling from the sky. If that rain had come down tonight, we might have started wondering if God didn’t want Jeremy to celebrate his birthday anymore. Or maybe our eating at IHOP was enough of a punishment, I’m not sure.

There were also a few quotes worth sharing (there were a lot, really, but only a few that make sense without worrying about context):

“I stay out of trailer parks. That’s Cracker City.”
“It’s funny how talking about sterility can kill a conversation.”
“To pronounce the name ‘Marissa’, just pretend you’re a Chinese person saying ‘Melissa’.” (I’m probably going to Hell for that one, but it sounded really funny when I said it.)