Birthday thoughts

Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes.

This doesn't seem as traumatic a day as last year. Actually, my birthday has gone mostly unremarked in the everyday world, but not due to neglect or apathy or anything like that. My mom has a pretty serious cold - has had it for about three days now, and it doesn't show signs of letting up. While I am made of titanium and diamonds and have the constitution and physique of an ox (most of the time), most of the people around me are a bit more frail and fragile. So we will wait until she is better to have a family get-together.

I took her to the doctor's first thing this morning, which on a day off is 11:00. While she was there I went grocery shopping. She called for me to pick her up as I was loading the groceries into the car. We then went to the drugstore to drop off a prescription - she may have something more than a cold, or maybe her doctor just likes prescribing drugs unnecessarily. They told us it would take twenty minutes to fill, so we did a quick tour - first to a liquor store for me to get some whiskey for traditional health tonics (this time, I'm trying Feckin Irish Whiskey), then to an ATM, then to my house for me to verify that the Calcium Chloride I spread yesterday evening had done its job, then to Sanitary Bakery to pick up my birthday cake and a dozen or so pastries that caught my eye, and then finally back to the drugstore drive-through pickup window to find that they were not quite ready with my mom's prescription.

My mom stayed in the car while I went into the store to kill time while waiting for them to fill the prescription. I didn't notice anything that really caught my eye - they seem to be all out of 2009 calendars, even though last year I was able to get a MAD Magazine calendar the day after Valentine's Day. As I approached the prescription desk, I noticed that there was only one cake of Williams Mug Shaving Soap left - and it was on clearance for 50% off. (Why is this on clearance? Is Williams not making it anymore? Is Combe Incorporated, their parent company, going out of business? If that's the case, I guess we should all stock up on Ice Blue Aqua Velva!)

Came back to my mom's house, unloaded the car, re-salted the sidewalks (which had frozen over), reheated some chicken soup as a late lunch for the both of us, put some clothes in the wash.

And that was it.

I'm not complaining. A low-key birthday was pretty pleasant for a change, and I received birthday greetings over the phone and in the mail and through e-mails and IMs and MySpace and Facebook and this blog - again, thank you everybody!

Maybe this weekend, we'll finally cut the cake!