44.

I’m 44 today.  Now I’ve know Jeremy for half my life, I met him in Brady’s graduate level fluid dynamics class this week 22 years ago.  I do not like celebrating my birthday, but I did extra nice things for myself today.  I’m lucky in so many ways, I feel fortunate to have lasted another year and I’m looking forward to the next one.  I try to be grateful for all the things I’ve been given which far exceed the things I have given away.  One of the amazing things I’ve been given, of course, is my own life, and for that I thank my mom and dad for everything.

We started this morning with the birthday breakfast.  This is the trouble with having birthdays so close together – we just had a birthday breakfast last week!

I asked for the classic birthday breakfast sandwich.

I opened my gifts, the Born to Run book was a surprise gift from a friend.  Jeremy got me the other two things, Commonwealth which was just released yesterday from one of my favorite authors -Ann Patchett.  I read Bel Canto in Taiwan when I was very lonely and had 4 month old Vince on my own during the day when Jeremy was at work, and it was a fantastic book.  I’ve also loved a bunch of her non-fiction work, especially the one about her friendship with Lucy Grealy.  Her other fiction work, to me, has been so-so, I did read a number of them, but I didn’t feel that always-reaching-for-the-book feeling that I like to get.  But this one got fantastic reviews and is her first semi-autobiographical work of fiction, so I’m hoping that it’ll do it for me.   Jeremy also got me a mic – in anticipation for doing interviews?  Maybe a podcast?  We’ll see.

I took the day off of work and I spent it socializing.  In the morning, I met up for coffee with the moms from Edda’s class.  Of course, within 3 minutes of sitting down, we talked about seizures and g-tubes as if we were talking about soccer games and homecoming.  I’m so happy to have some moms in class.  Maybe we’ll do something special for class this year.  We’ll see.

At 11 am, I opened my laptop to check in on Jeremy’s AMA (ask me anything) on reddit.  Reddit is a little like a free-for-all forum where everyone asks questions and answers and the most popular ones get “upvoted” and moved up the “page”.  I upvoted everything and he said it reached the front page.  Jeremy said this two hours on reddit exhausted him for the rest of the day.  I’m sorry, this photo just highlights how dirty my laptop screen is.

Then I went to lunch with the friend who sent me the Born to Run book.  I know she doesn’t really like to have her photo taken, so I took a photo of the dessert I had.  We went to this new place in Rockville which had fabulous food, but terrible service.  I think we had to wait 20 minutes for our sandwiches (delicious!) and it took 10 minutes to actually pay.  So delicious and disappointing at the same time.  Lucky for us, we had no pressing engagements afterwards, so we happily spent 2 hours sitting and chatting.

Dad still is in a bunch of sciatica pain,  Vince helping him do some PT moves.  Dad has a plan in place – we are keeping our fingers crossed that it all resolves soon.

Finally, a quiet moment & Jeremy sings me happy birthday.  <3  Good night!