Yep, I got older. Who'd've thunk it?

It was, all in all, a lovely day. Random and bizarre at points, but that's pretty much par for the course for me. I'd be totally weirded out by normal.

It started before we went to sleep last night. Willem and I both stayed up too late, I was finishing a novel and he was playing online. We finally went to bed around 2:00, and had one of those lights-out conversations that made sense in the moment, but the next morning has you going, "Did we REALLY talk about strippers in Niagara Falls twirling black squirrels instead of tassels???"

Then he got up and nudged Emily toward the bus at some ungodly hour, while I slept in until 9:00. At which point he prepared breakfast for me, which probably on an ordinary day would have contained 4,000 calories but, being consumed on my birthday, was calorie-free.

Then he took Jacob, and later Emily, to go shopping for a few gifts for me. I already got a very nice digital camcorder/camera thingy, but there must be torn wrapping paper on the floor on the day of, ya know? And this year he was able to at least minimize the grumbling about how close my birthday is to Mother's Day and how hard it is to come up with separate gift ideas for both occasions. This from the man whose birthday is the DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS. But I digress.

So, they all left and I spent an hour playing Cribbage online in a quiet house. It was a religious experience, just about. Then I made a few phone calls, and ended up with a 12:00 hair appointment and a 3:20 doctor's appointment. Both within about 20 minutes of the house, so it should have meant a lot of downtime in between.

Should have. Except I got my hair cut at the beauty school, where the supervisors hover and double-check every step of the way, leaving the actual student-haircutters paranoid and obsessive-compulsive. I got less than 1/2 an inch trimmed off, just wanted to even up the ends since it'd been 6 months since my last haircut, and I was there for TWO HOURS. Now, maybe there are people out there with nerves of steel. People who are immune to sleep-deprivation and low-grade hairstylist-induced narcoepsy. People who can have a two-hour haircut and not slowly fade into a coma, unable to blink both eyes at the same time or create coherent sentences. I am not those people. It was blissful. And cost $10 - that's with a $3 tip.

After that, I managed to pour my blissed-out self back into the car and stop home, but had to leave 20 minutes later for the other appointment. The doctor's appointment. The annual GYN appointment.

Oh, yes. On my birthday. Can a girl get any luckier?? But I had miscounted how many weeks of birth control I had left, and then before my last appointment I had hurt my back and didn't think I could (a) get myself there, (b) hop up onto the table, or (c) scootch to the end and stare at the ceiling, without ridiculous pain and therefore undignified whimpering. And really, isn't dignity THE single most important aspect of that type of exam?

And timing being what it was, it was today or maybe not until next week... which means, after that whole Sunday start thing. Yee haw! I told them, I should at least get a margarita with the exam... maybe a massage... at least a warm handshake? There was brief discussion of having the exam relocated to the beach, but the idea of sand in all the wrong places and permanently traumatizing the onlookers vetoed that.

The drive home from that one was totally bizarre. First I saw what I am trying very, very hard to convince myself was a piece of plastic and NOT a cute defenseless shortlived little turtle crossing the highway. Then I watched an open-top Jeep veer very suddenly from the lefthand lane onto the righthand shoulder, at which point the driver leaned over the passenger door (happily, there was no passenger in the way) and vomited enthusiastically, never letting go of the steering wheel. Then he sat up, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and signaled to return to the driving lane. Okay then.

But I came home to a lovely dinner, ice cream cake, and some time with the kids. Then my father got a call that he had to move his truck's trailer, which he'd left parked at a Sam's Club about an hour from here. So I spent the evening in a semi. Wearing my new "Princess Bride" t-shirt and occasionally thumbing through my new book of True Crime Photographs while snacking on an apple from my lovely fruit basket.

It's good to be loved, in all my occasionally disjointed interests.