{"id":2392,"date":"2011-04-01T21:17:20","date_gmt":"2011-04-01T21:17:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/?p=2392"},"modified":"2011-04-01T21:17:20","modified_gmt":"2011-04-01T21:17:20","slug":"things-i-have-done-lately-birthdays-edition-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/01\/things-i-have-done-lately-birthdays-edition-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Things I Have Done Lately: Birthdays Edition (PART 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ever since we got back from the cruise, my dance card has been totally booked.\u00a0 Instead of a bunch of posts that I’ll be putting together until May, I’ll just sum it up in two posts.\u00a0 Part 2 next week.<\/p>\n

My Birthday (March 3): On the day of, I hadn’t planned anything special, but my AP wasn’t having that and she took me to a really nice restaurant for lunch called Roaring Fork.\u00a0 I had some pretty yummy short rib tacos, but the green chili mac and cheese was to die for.\u00a0 Also, I was coerced into a spicy chocolate brownie sundae, which was ALSO to die for.\u00a0 Zliten had to work through lunch but had a really awesome edible arrangement sent to my office, which was super sweet!<\/p>\n

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After work, I took the night off the gym (I know, crazy, huh), and opened my presents.\u00a0 I got a kindle, a scrabble game, a TROPHY saying I am the awesomest person ever, and a bunch of other cool stuff!\u00a0 Zliten is way too good to me!\u00a0 Then we hit… the salad bar.\u00a0 Honestly, after a really decadent lunch, it was exactly what I wanted.\u00a0 After dinner, I wanted to have a drink or 2, and somehow that ended up being drinking until the wee hours.<\/p>\n

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Gussied Up<\/p>\n

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My AWESOME trophy!<\/p>\n

The next day was a little painful, but we made it.\u00a0 I pushed myself to elliptical and swim since I skipped working out the day before, but after, our plans were to just go home after work and watch movies and relax.\u00a0 Instead, we got coerced into having a beer (or wine in my case) with a friend – which turned into a huge work party of people by the end of the night (just as we were leaving, coworkers started showing up, and then there was no escaping).\u00a0 There were birthday shots, and my facebook picture was projected on the sign the bar has that overlooks the freeway for at least 15 minutes wishing me happy birthday.\u00a0 It was bad ass!<\/p>\n

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Saturday, we were already supertired and kinda over it, but birthday celebrations were already planned, so I got dressed up and got in the car for a surprise!\u00a0 Lo and behold, we ended up at Trulucks.\u00a0 I started with a mojito, Zliten got a flight of red wines, and we ordered an appetizer of SHRIMP THE SIZE OF MY HAND.\u00a0 In this case, they cannot be called shrimp any more?\u00a0 Anti-shrimp?\u00a0 Big daddies?\u00a0 Our reservation came a bit later just as the piano player came, I ordered a white wine flight (in which I found my new favorite type of wine, Chenin Blanc from France, and my second fave, unoaked Chardonnay), and we got fresh snow crab that had been literally flown in that afternoon.\u00a0 There was NOTHING wrong with this meal.<\/p>\n

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Then, after being pampered and waited on hand and foot (gotta love super fancy restaurants who are all about making you feel special), they bring us two of their mini cupcakes, chocolate and carrot cake.\u00a0 While anything chocolate usually has a special place in my heart, good lord the carrot cake with cream cheese frosting was amazing.\u00a0 AMAZING.\u00a0 Perfect little sizes too, just a couple bites each.\u00a0 AND they gave me a birthday card signed by all the staff.\u00a0 I thought that was an amazing touch.\u00a0 We came home, contemplated getting all wild and rowdy with the party making again, and then just decided to have one more glass of wine and chill the heck out.<\/p>\n

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Sunday: Got up, and bought Mr. Zliten his bike.\u00a0 Went home, and did a 12.5 mile ride in the gorgeous sunshine.\u00a0 We then lumped on the couch the rest of the day until we had some friends over for homemade chili and salad and drank more wine.\u00a0 It was a beautiful, wonderful weekend of birthdayness.<\/p>\n

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Zliten’s Birthday (March 14): Left work that Friday the 11th, ran 2 miles and swam almost a mile, and then came home and we started prepping for the party the next day (ok, so we had been all week – but things went into full swing).\u00a0 I woke up super early that next day and couldn’t sleep, and had been dreaming about balloons and streamers, so I hit party city and procured pretty colored decorations to adorn the house and yard.\u00a0 Zliten then decided we needed more seating, so he bought 10 folding chairs and an ez up canopy for our yard.\u00a0 Much cleaning and decorating commenced, but by the time people got there, it was all ready, minus the streamers.\u00a0 Our first guests got that honor.<\/p>\n

All in all we had about 30 people and kids over celebrating with us.\u00a0 We went through an entire package of costco burgers and almost a full costco package of hotdogs, and there was, as always, way too much yummy food around to handle.\u00a0 We even had an awesome Jigglypuff cake!\u00a0 I think I ended up having ONE hot dog with all the other crazy going on, but a lot of munchies.\u00a0 And the punch.\u00a0 Had to make sure it wasn’t poisoned, right (though the rum probably would have killed the poison, but whatevs)?\u00a0 We had both of our neighbors come over at various times (love the house location, they don’t mind our parties!), and I ended up staying up until it got\u00a0 light out with my friend D.<\/p>\n

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In my mind it was probably a rage against getting older, and proving we could still, at 32, party til dawn.\u00a0 However, the latter part of the night ended up with us drinking mostly water to sober up, playing bad pop loudly on the laptop with the speakers turned up (sorry neighbors), and sucking the helium out of the balloons and singing along.\u00a0 So, almost more befitting of 12 year olds, but I think it adequately served it’s purpose. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

I apparently did not facebook or tweet that next day.\u00a0 I’m pretty sure it was spent sleeping, eating, a little cleaning, and not much else.<\/p>\n

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Monday, I sent my honey off to work ahead of me and blew up some balloons with the leftover helium and put them on his desk at work.\u00a0\u00a0 He loved it!\u00a0 I let him pick lunch and dinner, and at lunch, we decided to go to the salad bar… but it was CLOSED!\u00a0 Argh!\u00a0 We decided instead to go hit up firebowl and get our stir fry on.\u00a0 Not our first choice, but since he had been working a lot of OT and just finished, it was the first time we got to go to lunch together for 3 weeks so it was super nice no matter what we were eating.<\/p>\n

After work, we hit up a place called Hoovers.<\/p>\n

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My food!<\/p>\n

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Food for the birthday boy!<\/p>\n

Southern fried down home cookin’.\u00a0 I expected to not be able to find something even in the REALM of healthy on the menu, but I ended up with a side salad with light spicy ranch that was super yum (I might come back just to get a salad there), half a jerked chicken (I just ate the breast), green beans (in butter, but whatevs), and creamed jalapeno spinach (I KNOW this wasn’t healthy but DAY-UM it was goood).\u00a0 Zliten got the chicken fried chicken he’d been craving and it did not disappoint.\u00a0 We split a piece of buttermilk pie for desert since we had never had it before and uh, yum!\u00a0 No singing or candles this time, I think we were over birthdays for really by then.<\/p>\n

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Ok, so I was going to do this all in one post, but I have SO MUCH MORE TO SAY about Houston and Flatonia.\u00a0 I’ll do part 2 next week. In conclusion about turning 32 – it’s kinda like 31.\u00a0 But I’ve been driving half my life.\u00a0 I can’t say I’m really feeling like I need anything more going on that I’m missing.\u00a0 Between this fabulous reality I’ve created of being an athlete and a successful video game producer and married to the most wonderful Zliten in the world and have fabulous friends and a social life, I have no idea where I could fit MUCH MORE HAPPY or OTHER AWESOME THINGS in without exploding, or at least sacrificing sleep.\u00a0 And I loves me some sleep.\u00a0 When your life involves regularly chosing between one thing you really love to do and another thing you really love to do, these are the kinda problems you want to have, right? Not many complaints here with life, the universe, et al.<\/p>\n

Let it rock, my friends, let it rock.\u00a0 Question of the day: what was your fave birthday celebration?<\/p>\n

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Ever since we got back from the cruise, my dance card has been totally booked.\u00a0 Instead of a bunch of posts that I’ll be putting together until May, I’ll just sum it up in two posts.\u00a0 Part 2 next week. My Birthday (March 3): On the day of, I hadn’t planned anything special, but my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paUhDu-CA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2392"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2392"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2411,"href":"http:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2392\/revisions\/2411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}