Well, it's over and gone for another year (depending on who you ask; I officially halted all celebrations at midnight, but my husband said that as long as you haven't gone to sleep, it's still the previous night....if that's true, we could be celebrating my birthday for another week if I *really* pushed myself and spent every penny of our grocery fund on coffee and/or chocolate covered expresso beans).

All in all, it didn't suck, which is always good.

I started my day by getting up at 11am. Let me remind you that it was MY birthday and it is my right as the Birthday Princess to sleep in that late, and even later if I had wanted to.

After I drug myself out of bed, I went to the kitchen and had a piece of left over birthday cake for breakfast (again....MY birthday, it's allowed). Why "left over", you ask? Because we had the "official" celebration last night because everyone had to work today. I'm all about starting the partying early!

After my very rich piece of cake, I got a call from my friend Maria who I had invited out to lunch to celebrate. But as luck would have it, Maria was sick. I'm not talking hold a heating pad to your forehead to get out of something sick, I mean she was SICK (I guess I should say IS sick, other wise it kind of sounds like she didn't pull through...the doctor said she had a couple of ear infections, and an upper respratory thing, but she'll be fine). Somehow I missed the inital phone call, and this started a day long game of phone tag. Maria and I rarely actually talk to each other, but I've become pretty close to her answering machine over the years.

Maria and I did not have lunch because after she left the doctor's office, she went home, laid down on her bed and passed out for about seven hours.

While Maria was trying to sleep off the ickys (or is it "ickies"? That actually looks better), my husband called with an offer for lunch, which I accepted. It wasn't candlelit, or even in a restaurant. It was at his place of business. We grabbed a hot dog from the vendor who works outside of the store, sat in the break room and chowed down. After word, we walked around the store and looked at all of the cool Christmas decorations they had on display (actually, eating in this way and wandering around the store is the way we usually spend his lunch break on Saturdays, but it's still fun).

From the store, I went shopping with my birthday money. Unless it involves DVDs, CDs or some electronic device in which to play them, I'm usually not too into shopping for things. That's why it's really weird that one of the things I wanted was a pair of shoes. But these are CUTE shoes. And cheap. They were only $10 at a little store off the square.

After shopping at the little store, I came home and continued my shopping online. So far, I've only bought one thing online and that was a Def Leppard CD, because I am SERIOUSLY over due to own one (about 25 years to be exact). So, after buying a cute pair of shoes and a CD at a GREAT bargin price, I still have $85 of the $100 I started out with this morning.

After making a list of a few more things that I would have to price and shop for at a later time, I went to the bedroom, grabbed the remote and stretched out across the bed. I don't know why I even bothered to turn the TV on because as soon as I kicked off my new shoes and pulled the blanket over me, I was fast asleep. I didn't even know I was tired, but apparently my body wanted a quick 30 minutes of sleep.

I just kind of played around online until my husband got home, then he took me out for dinner. We originally went to Macaroni Grill and learned the wait was an hour. I would have been okay with that, if there hadn't been people EVERYWHERE. Every chair, every inch of standing room, every door frame was clogged with people. My tolerance for massive amounts of loud, cranky people is VERY small. We decided to go somewhere else and ended up at The Bunganut Pig .

If there's one place I like to eat out, it's a pub. I LOVE pubs. I can't explain why. Either you get it, or you don't. I have thought about going to Ireland, but then decided that I probably wouldn't remember it because I would be living in the pubs ("There's hills in Ireland?!"). We had good service, (what I thought was) a great meal, and didn't have to wait at all to get a seat!

The rest of the evening was pretty much a kicking back fest. Robert and I went to his parents house and hung out in the hot tub for a long while. After that, we came home, I took a shower to wash off the chlorine, came online, played in some online poker matches and then started writing this.

The only really crappy part of my day (well, besides Maria getting sick), is that my new shoes BROKE. The clasp that holds the strap across was very cheap and bent easily. *sigh* So, tomorrow I have to start out my day by taking the shoes BACK to the store (I hate returning things, especially when I have to tell the people that I'm returning it because their stuff is crap).

So, if today was an indicator of how the rest of my 26th year is going to play out, I'm going to have broken shoes, wait a long time at restaurants and spend a lot of time restoring my friends' health.

Oh! I just remembered something interesting. This is the first year that I can remember that I haven't gotten the play by play from my mom about what she was doing 26 years ago. It always ends at 8:09pm with "...and after you were a week past your due date, and 25 hours of labor, I got to hold my little daughter in my arms for the first time." (Yeah, it's true....I was quite content where I was, but my mom and the doctor worked together to evict me from my warm, cozy, rent free space).

My 25th year was pretty good.

I hope the 26th is equally as good, if not better.