So, I turned twenty-five. And it hasn't killed me yet.
I took Thursday off work, because I hadn't actually slept through the night for a few days -- the coughing (my own) kept waking me up. Given my level of exhaustion, I decided that anything I touched was liable to turn to crap and have to be redone once I'd slept anyway... so, I didn't go to work. Instead I spent the day laying in Steady's bed.
Then I took a nap from like five pm until after eleven. Then I went back to bed at two and slept until eight.
Friday morning, I didn't actually feel especially rested. I got to work, and my office door was decorated! There were pink streamers and yellow balloons and some "Caution: Birthday Zone" plastic tape. It was very exciting.
So, after that everyone who saw me wished me a Happy Birthday. Then they'd want to know how old I was. I guess they had no idea that in many cases I am about their children's age. Somehow this didn't make me feel any less old.
Steady came over to feed and water the cat while I was at work. He called me while he was here, because the pump on the water dish is broken. Then my regular phone rang and I cajoled him into answering it. He took the message that my grandmother wishes me a happy birthday.
Then it was five pm and I ran out of work and came home. On the way, I listened to five different messages of people singing Happy Birthday into my voicemail. I got dressed up and Steady and I went to the vegetarian Chinese restaurant for dinner.
I made him take pictures of me as the pretty, pretty birthday princess. Sadly, while he was trying to take a decent picture of me, I was apparently turning funny colors, developing red eye so severe that attempting to correct it has proven futile, closing my eyes, looking frumpy, or just generally not looking like the girl I was seeing in the mirror.
So, here's the best one. I know I look like my shirt is about to fall off and in my eagerness to look less red I've turned a little yellow. It's better than the redness.
I was so excited about dinner that I was bouncing up and down and sing-songing about my happiness from approximately the time I finished straightening my hair through my second plate full of faux meat.
Steady was not so excited. For whatever reason, he just wasn't crazy about the idea of fake meat. He almost just ordered a vegetable dish, but then he saw how very sad that would make me and agreed to split two real meals with me. We had sweet and sour pork and curried chicken. He did not try the "chicken", but he liked the "pork".
We sat in the brightly lit room with all the other people near by -- it's one of those kinds of restaurants -- and I tried very hard to behave myself and not blow my nose or have hacking cough attacks too loudly between spurts of bouncing up and down in my chair babbling about how happy I was to be there.
He agreed that we could go back there while I was bouncing up and down in the car about how exciting the experience of going to a restaurant where I could eat anything on the menu really is and he was driving home.
After that we stopped off at the video store and the grocery. We dithered for quite some time over the potential birthday cakes... there were some cupcakes that actually said "Mary Ann's Stuffed Baskets", but we didn't buy them because they didn't actually look like they would be any good.
We had cake and turned on a movie. Then I fell asleep. Then Steady woke me up to ask me if I wanted to be asleep. This set off a thirty minute coughing extravaganza which ended shortly after the movie was turned back on. Then I fell back asleep. Somehow Steady managed to get the computer off of my lap and I stayed asleep for like three solid hours. Then I woke up to cough some more...
So, that's the story of my twenty-fifth birthday. It was very quiet and slightly boring except for the very exciting part where I got to go to a restaurant where I didn't have to skim the menu looking for the items that I could eat.
