The Birthday Weekend

I'm starting to have a little more sympathy for morning people. I often gripe that being a morning person is generally considered to be more virtuous than being a night person. Stay up working until 1 a.m. and then sleep until ten a.m. and all anyone notices is that you're still in bed at ten, so you must be a lazy sloth. But you're virtuous and diligent if you get up and get started on your day before six, regardless of how long you actually work. I'm still not what a real morning person would consider a morning person, but my body clock tends to shift earlier in the summer, and during the evil heat wave, I've been trying to deal with stuff like errands before it hits 100 degrees, which means before noon, at the latest. That can be a challenge. The bank opens at 9, it's nearly impossible to get a haircut before 11 a.m. (and that's when the salon opens, so the haircut starts later and probably isn't over by noon) and today I was at the grocery store trying to buy tortillas so I could make fajitas, and they said they don't make tortillas until after noon. Trying to get stuff done in the morning is difficult.

Then again, that might come back around to discrimination against night people. Morning people would do these kinds of errands after they've done a full day's work. It's night people who do this kind of stuff early before settling down to work.

But enough griping. I had a terrific birthday weekend, and I managed to spread the celebration throughout the whole weekend. First, on Friday night, a gathering of my friends to watch the Phineas & Ferb movie turned into a bit of a birthday party when one of my friends brought a dark chocolate with dark chocolate icing (YUM!) cake. You can't possibly be old when you have a Phineas & Ferb birthday party. I've never really liked the idea of actually having a birthday party, since I don't want people to feel obligated to bring presents. I just enjoy celebrating with friends, so this was perfect. Then on Saturday night I went out to dinner with friends, and we did some wandering at Target (where I found season one of Parks & Recreation and a cheap DVD of Secondhand Lions) before spending a little time at the lake just before sunset. And then on Sunday, my actual birthday, someone from church took me out to lunch with a mutual friend, and we got cupcakes with a candle (and the real joy of watching a two-year-old eating a cupcake, which is true entertainment, almost as good as eating the cupcake yourself). Then I had tons of birthday wishes via Facebook and even got a phone call from my brother. I think all that counts as "something good happening to me," which I was whining about needing a couple of weeks ago.

I didn't get much fuss for my birthdays when I was a kid. Having a summer birthday meant I didn't get a party at school (there was one school that had a "summer birthday" party, but it was shared by every other kid who had a birthday in June, July or August) and I only had a couple of parties during childhood since being away from school made it difficult to invite school friends. Plus, in the military world, there's a lot of moving going on during the summer. If I hadn't just moved to a new place so that I didn't yet know anyone (or if we weren't in the middle of moving), then often my friends had just moved away and I didn't yet know the new people who'd moved in. A birthday party for me was dinner with my family. One nice thing about adulthood has been making up for that. In my office job days, there were office parties, and then I was actually able to do stuff with friends for my birthday.

This is going to be a busy week. Choir and ballet start again, and WorldCon is next week, so I have lots of getting ready to do, and I'd like to finish this draft of the current project before I go so I can let it rest.