amy said to me this morning, “you aren’t going to do too much today, are you?”

“no,” replied me.

we took a lovely walk/run this morning with all the dogs.

then i went home and mopped the floors.  i realize i probably could have found something slightly more fun and entertaining to do, but the floors were full of muddy footprints not to mention lots of debris.

it wasn’t so bad plus now i feel great about having clean floors.  calmer.  happier.

seriously, i must be losing my mind, typing sentences like that.

but it’s ok that i’m losing my mind because it’s my birthday and i can do what i want.

amy and jim brought me a couple of early birthday presents; they’re these really cool hanging-down lights that attach to umbrellas on the deck.

first we had to find the umbrellas.  it’s always like a treasure hunt trying to find something.  only not as much fun.

kevin had said they were in the garage, so we looked and looked and looked there, but no umbrellas.  so we looked in the other garage, and then in the basement.  nope.  plus the basement is best avoided altogether whenever possible so as not to throw me into an immediate depression about how much stuff is down there and what a horrible frickin’ mess it is.

back to the garage.  amy found two umbrellas in the corner, one of them blue striped and the other one not.  we were agreed that the umbrellas were blue striped, but we were pretty sure this wasn’t that umbrella because the one we remembered was a more vibrant blue.  also, where was the other one?  jim thought the umbrellas were solid blue.

but then he found a matching blue striped umbrella outside the garage, broken.

oh.

we put up the two non-matching umbrellas and they look perfectly nice.  then we had to unfurl the lights.  this was a very complicated process because each strand had ties on it then we had to untangle them and then they had to be evenly arranged around the top of the umbrella.  and we were NOT DOING IT RIGHT, according to amy.  i told amy that she shouldn’t be bossing me around on my birthday, but it didn’t matter because they NEEDED TO BE PERFECT.

it all took quite a while; after the perfectly-arranging we had to clip them on with these little clips and after a while i got bored and started sweeping the deck.

they look good now and i’m looking forward to seeing them at night.

we were going to go to a winery that was having a bluegrass festival today, but when we finally got in the car it was kind of late and the winery is an hour and 20 minutes away and we decided, instead, to go to lunch.  a new place called kiku, which means “chrysanthamum” in japanese, or at least i think that’s what amy said; she looked it up online as i drove.  it’s one of those japanese grill places where you sit around the grill and the chef does entertaining things with eggs.  plus more.  he flipped a whole egg up in the air and then down on his metal spatula and maybe i’ll try that someday, when i feel like wasting a bunch of eggs.

we sat at a table with a couple with their two little kids and the boy had really wanted to come to the restaurant but when the chef started twirling his spatulas and clanging them around, the kid got scared and crawled under the table.

highly entertaining.

the chef fried up the eggs and cut them into little pieces and tried to throw them in our mouths.  we were all terrible at this.  i don’t think he was really aiming for our mouths.

i had sushi instead of the grilled stuff, and it was delicious.

so things are going pretty well here on my birthday except, of course, i should be outside in the lovely weather instead of in here typing.  i could have brought my laptop out onto the deck, but whenever i go out there i just want to start cleaning it.  yeah, insane, i know.  hopefully this will pass soon.  the thing is, i’m not really a neat freak, but things just get SO BAD eventually that i have to clean a lot and then i really really don’t want things to get bad again so i don’t have to clean again because it really just starts to feel like a neverending kind of annoying thing.

if we’d have gone to hear bluegrass at the winery i’d be drinking wine right now.  i wish drinking wine was actually enjoyable during the middle of the day, but it would have just made me sleepy and then i’d have had to have a nap before dinner.  isntead i had lots of tea and am continuing to drink lots of it which might explain why i have so much energy right now.

ok, i’m going outside now and will try not to clean anything.

maybe i’ll take some photos.

all right already,

birthday grace.