Blog, Essays & Art

Happy Birthday to me. 08/21/02

So Sunday the 18th was my birthday. The celebration started on Friday night, when I got home from work Steve & I went out for a Sushi dinner. I love sushi, especially barbecued eel.

Saturday we slept in late and I took a nice long hot bath, then we walked down to the beach to bask in the sun. It was a beautiful bright day with a light breeze. Returning to the house, we sat out in the chairs under the umbrella in the front yard and read books and listened to music. Corwin chameleon got to climb around in the sun on the front hedges, and the cats hung out with us outside too.

In the evening we went out to meet friends at Perg downtown for coffee. After everyone had congregated we went out for pub-style food & beer & cider, then to the Red Room. I got presents of flowers and a stuffed cat, and they bought me drinks too. It was great to see my friends from the City again, and almost everyone I normally see when we're out drinking was there. Being the center of attention at many times during the celebration, I felt so contented, appreciated, exuberant. The time passed by so quickly, I don't know how many drinks I had, I was in a high-spirited, slightly dizzy, almost gregarious state. We walked down the street afterwards to the diner, where I had Olallieberry pie and coffee.

I guess it was about 3 in the morning when we finally went home and I collapsed on the bed.

Sunday I woke up so slowly, not quite hung over, but feeling as if I'd done a week's worth of adventuring the day before. I opened gifts from Steve and from my relatives. Typically, my mother sent me expired snack food as a birthday present. Not special gourmet fancy snacks but ordinary stuff from the grocery-outlet store. My brother sent books and an anime video which looks like it would be fun to watch while getting really stoned and eating pizza. The presents from Steve were lovely as always. He likes to get me jewelry, so I got 2 bracelets, a pendant, and a carved-wood jewelry box.

Having already done many of the things we usually do in a weekend, we didn't have any cool ideas of activities for the day, so we spent a while driving around town, seeing neighborhoods we hadn't been in yet. This place is full of twisting turning little streets, pockets of nice houses hidden among hill & forest areas. We stopped at Nob Hill’s bakery for a cake, and noticed a paved walkway at the end of the store parking lot, that looked like the beginning of a park trail. So we decided to explore. It led over a bridge, then to a ruin of a mansion. I'd known that it existed, somewhere in this neighborhood, but had never seen the place or known much about it. As we wandered about the structure and tried to imagine what it would have looked like maybe 100 years ago, I started daydreaming about exploring ruins and castles in Europe.

Later in the evening, my Birthday dinner this year was at the Crow’s Nest.  I had the most incredibly delicious and tender filet mignon. Steve had the salmon which was also tasty. Then we went to the comedy show in the bar upstairs. I wasn't much in the mood for booze considering Saturday night's indulgence, but the comics were hella funny even though I was sober.