A birthday and an anniversary
This is my one thousandth LJ entry! I'm not feeling insightful enough to try to make sense of those 999 entries. A lot has happened since I entered the blogosphere in 2005. I left Sacramento, moved to Ohio, earned a Ph.D., opened (and closed) a MySpace account, adopted Kidlet, learned the ukulele (well, it's getting there), battled a kidney stone and giant preying mantises, traveled to exotic places (Italy, Canada, West Virginia, Toledo), helped turn Ohio into a blue state, opened a Facebook account, read a whole bunch of books, and flew three cats across the country, among other activities. It's been an exciting six years.
Today is also my 36th birthday. stinky_monky insists this means I'm in my late thirties. I like to think that my mid-thirties last until I turn 37. I might lose that battle in the long run, but I only have to hold reality off for a year.
Part of my birthday present was an overnight road trip to scenic Cincinnati over the weekend. We wanted to visit the Newport Aquarium (across the river in Kentucky), IKEA, and Jungle Jim's (which carries many food from across the planet but, most importantly, lots of types of beer). It turned into kind of a fiasco. It was obscenely hot. Kidlet refused to take a nap and got cranky. The aquarium did not allow strollers inside until 4pm. I got us lost trying to find a parking garage. Kidlet woke up at 1:30am and didn't get back to sleep until s_m took him for a drive around 6am. We both considered driving home before the sun came up.
But we got stubborn and accomplished most of our goals. We made it through the aquarium in an hour. We got to IKEA before it opened the next day and cruised through in 90 minutes. Record time for both locations. Then we got payback from the night before by keeping kidlet awake the whole way home. There was a frantic dancing moose toy, loud music, and plenty of tickling. The last 20 minutes or so were pretty hairy, but we made it. As soon as we got home he took a four-hour nap, and the rest of us slept almost as long.
The Cincinnati waterfront, with a random boat thrown in.
More boats! I'm fascinated with the massive barges that are pushed up and down the big rivers around here. The floating containers are lashed together and seem like disasters waiting to happen (oh wait, yep, yep, yep, and yep). And you can't visit the Ohio River without seeing a riverboat.
stinky_monky and Kidlet at the Newport Aquarium. Kidlet wanted to grab a fish. And he called fish "babies."
And a rare sight indeed: an empty IKEA. We got in before the store opened. I like to think it's because we're VIPs. It's probably because we looked feral after a night without sleep.
And then a thunderstorm came through on Sunday night and we lost power until 9pm. It was a weird, but memorable, weekend.
Today I was off work and ran a bunch of non-birthday-related errands that had been hanging over me for a while. But that's not important because we had Five Guys for dinner and s_m made perfect cupcakes (yellow cake and chocolate frosting) last night. And it's time to go eat a whole bunch of them.