2006-08-31 - 9:04 p.m.

I had a really fun birthday weekend. Spending time with friends, eating fun food, drinking good drink, playing card games (Laconia rules, but of course) and falling asleep while watching The Neverending Story while Aly reads comics on the other couch and Brian and Hannah roam around looking for the spare room . . . all of these things add up to Funky Pumas. By which I mean, "fun".

Now it's the end of the summer. A lot of things happened. I went to several concerts. Paul Simon with Monique (sober). Counting Crows with Kate, Andrea and Rick (drunk). The Eels with TC and Peter - with Fred & Ellen at dinner beforehand (drunker). A surprise party of Hannah. Weddings for Vegan Friend & Vegan Friend and another one for Vegan Friend & Friend. It was a good summer. It was hectic. With lots of traveling. And new starts. And old bridges burned. And older bridges rebuilt. Fall is looking good. More weddings. More concerts. More fun. More serious.

It's fantastic to me that despite never asking anyone to bring canolis to one of my birthday parties, someone always manages to bring canolis. Chad took this role for many of them from high school to post college. But every year, like clockwork, a bag of canolis shows up. Kate brought them this year. I like that I can always have an assumption of canolis.

My actual birthday (the magic day when I turned 28 on the 28th, last Monday) was spent in Mass. (The state, not the church service.) Partially in Newburyport and partially in Haverhill. All in an effort to find a semi-mythical brewery that TC wanted Peter and me to go to. The end of the story finds the three of us in a Mandarin joint in Haverhill, on my birthday, joking about pudding and God knows what else. At some point during the meal, I struggled with idea of giving a toast. A birthday toast. A toast to me. To Peter. To TC. To the last year that was. Since my last birthday Peter had a daughter and TC got engaged. And I think I ate some ceral. So it all shakes out. I wanted to tell them that I knew it had been a tumultuous year. 08/05 - 08/06. Not that they didn't know that. Dizzying highs and terrying lows (and, of course, creamy middles). I wanted to tell them that I appreciated their friendship and that no matter where life led us I knew that come every 28th of August, whether we were together or not, I knew we'd still be friends. But it sounded pretty girly to say. Or lame. Or gay. (But you're not supposed to say, "gay" anymore. It's considered about as PC as an iMac.) So I didn't say anything. Instead we broke open our fortune cookies and laughed at our respective broken-english fortunes. It was a good birthday. Overcast. Quiet. But good.

It's been real,

Ord

�

<-- Back to the Salt Mines! - Onward, to the Bee-Mobile! -->

�