Nother Year Done

Well, another birthday’s come and gone. This one was not a milestone birthday for me; hence it passed like I like them to: uneventfully.

The wife was kind enough to drop off and pick up the little ones from school so I didn’t have to. Instead, I clocked a couple hours of OT and got a lot of work done. Despite a huge year calendar hanging on the wall behind me with my birthday prominently circled (as are all the employees’ in my office), in all the hustle and bustle no cake was bought for me. Which is good. Though I like eating cake and have eaten my share of co-workers’ birthday cakes (especially ice creeam ones in the summer), the thought of a dozen people singing “Happy Birthday” to me mortifies me to the very depths of my soul. It happened to me last year. But I was overlooked this year. Which is not to say I’m off the hook. In July they overlooked Jerry’s birthday, but they got him the first week in August.

Anyway, after work I drove home leisurely. Stopped at the store for a Foster’s and drank it at home at the writing desk listening to some music and checking my normal sites. The wife got home with the girls after soccer practice and made me something delightfully destructive: some Kraft recipe for cheese macs with ground beef tossed in.

Then I opened my cards and gifts. The girls wrote me very cute “Happy-Birthday-I-love-you!” cards with crayon and magic marker drawings inside. They bought me two much, much needed pairs of pants for work. Now I’ll no longer look like a hobo. We hustled the girls to sleep late, around 9 pm, then I went back down to the writing office and listened to a whole bunch of nostalgic tunes.

My mother-in-law upped her game by buying for me Rick Atkinson’s WW2 trilogy – over 2,000 pages between three hard covers. The first, An Army at Dawn, details the 1940-43 war in Northern Africa. Rommel versus Montgomery, with Eisenhower and Clark arriving in the third act. I’ll probably start it tonight or tomorrow night. I have my Fall reading down now, as I promised her a dissertation based on my reading.

Oh, and my mom gave me some birthday bucks, which the wife and I will probably apply to a joint birthday celebration out at a local eatery, sans children.

Now to kick some buttock in the few remaining years of my fifth decade of life on earth!