update on the birthday weekend

friday
after a lovely dinner with matt, leia, and dave, we met a bunch of my friends at the xpo lounge. billy gave me a teambilly hat which he tried to give me at the halloween party, but which i left behind out of guilt over it being his last one. so now i have a teambilly hat just like dave. josh gave me a copy of eddie izzard, which is fun... which is fun-ny. my friend jeff gave me a new digital guitar tuner. erica and karen brought balloons and a party hat to make it an official birthday party. everyone bought me a drink. stoli vanilla and coke. jav bought me a double tall vanilla stoli, then, after i laughed a good bit about it, took it back and had them put coke on top of it. i have never felt so lucky to have so many friends as i did friday night. it was definitely the best birthday gathering i can remember having. thanks again to everyone that was there!

saturday
i hung out with erica all day. we were somewhat lazy. we hit breakfast at ihop, then went to see the worst jet li film i've ever seen, the one. i donned the new threads erica picked up for me at the gap, plus this ultra cool jacket which she let me borrow, and we headed to the sugarbomb show at the bass performance hall. it was strange seeing them in a large venue where everyone was sitting down. it felt like the atmosphere sucked some of the energy out of the band. but it still rawked as they were quite fired up for the show.

sunday
sunday i had to work. blah. but...
...after work i went to new amsterdam where billy and dave were finishing up their third game of chess. billy talked me into sitting down for a game as dave headed off on something that may or may not have been a delta alpha tango echo. honestly, i didn't ask. i had never played a full game of chess before. to tell the truth, i've always been intimidated by the board. but after a couple of coached games ala billy, i felt much more at ease taking my own initiative in the game. the third one eventually fell to me. i guess now i have to keep playing since it seems i might have a knack for it.

overall this has been the best birthday i could have hoped for. i didn't get a vespa, but christmas is just around the corner. i'll keep the wishlist up just in case any of you missed out on the gift giving this go around.

it's really difficult to express in this forum how much it meant to have all of you there celebrating my youth. thanks again to everyone!