Happy Birthday to me!

Today's my 29th birthday. Yup, 29 years old. One of my oldest friends, Adele sent me a note wishing me happy birthday at the same time reminding me that the big 30 is not too far away! Kind of scary when you think about it. I wrote to her saying that 30 is a good age to reflect back on life and to see what you've accomplished in life, where life is headed and whether you are happy with the current direction.

A good part of the day today was spent staffing our agency table at a senior expo. I really like staffing the table because it gets me out of the office, and I'm able to network with some of our current providers and/or new providers. More importantly, I get to "sell" our agency to different people.

Dad and mom called me yesterday evening while I was at Kristi's house looking at photos from her Trans-Atlantic cruise. She and Brian took tons of photos so it was really neat to see the photos. Sis called at 5:20AM and left a voicemail stating that it would be nice to turn my phone on and having a voicemail from her wishing me happy birthday. She was right! Not many people (if ever) call me at 5:20AM. I figured as much it was her.

After the senior expo, I dropped by Sweet Binney's to pick up my birthday cake. It's been quite some time since I had cake for my birthday so this year I decided to order a cake. When I placed the order, I asked them to write "Happy Birthday To Me!" on the cake and the lady just laughed. Even the guys in the bakery had a great chuckle. Anthony never ceases to amaze people. The plan was to eat the cake at the office at 2PM. Alas, a good number of people were out of the office. So, I postponed the festivities to tomorrow morning at 11AM.

Six of us went out for dinner at my favorite Chinese restaurant. I had placed the food order a week ago and initially ordered seven dishes. However, I called the restaurant up yesterday and ordered two more dishes. The food was amazing as usual so there was no surprises at all. This time however, everyone utterly loved the walnut shrimp. All of them agreed that it was by far the best shrimp they've ever had. I thought it was fine. There were quite a lot of leftovers and who ended up with it? Me! Charlene took the shrimp home with her. All in all there was more than enough food to go around and then some. The six of us just had a blast eating and chatting with one another. This is what birthdays should be about. It's about connecting with people and having fun. I can see how some people would much rather have a grandiose celebration, but not me. I much rather have a small scale celebration with dear friends.

Tomorrow is the start of Clive After Five. It's an outdoor tent party where they serve beer and all the proceeds go towards different worthy causes in the greater Des Moines Area. The weather said it's supposed to rain, but hopefully the weather will be nice come 5:30PM. I even broached the subject of going out to a non-smoking bar/dance club after Clive After Five and a number of people were open to that suggestion. We'll see how that goes. If we do go to the bar/dance club, it will be my first in a very long time. I'm kind of looking forward to it, don't quite know why, but I am.

That's pretty much it for my birthday. I did have fun and a lot of it was because I had great people to celebrate it with!