Birfday Shennanigans

My birthday was officially yesterday, but my girlfriends and I celebrated on the 29th. For this year's festivities, I thought it would be fun if we got to experience a bit of fine dining, so I decided to do a girls night at the dessert room at Bern's Steakhouse. (Note: We did not actually have dinner at Bern's as that would have cost us our first-born children. To save money, we did dinner on our own individually and splurged at the dessert room.)

We had a blast. I have been blessed with such an amazing group of girlfriends (including the out-of-state ones who were there in spirit), and I wouldn't have greeted 28 any other way. I could do a write-up on what all went down, but Arleen beat me to it, and perfectly captured just how fun it was. Chickety-check it out here.

Alright, 28! Let's do this.

Oh yeah--happy Halloween!

A Blast From the Past

Last month, my friend Ali turned 25, and she thought it would be funny to celebrate by hosting a good old-fashioned skating party. Yes, you read that right. A skating party. At a skating rink. The kind we all used to frequent when we were thirteen. And since it'd been about that long since I stepped foot inside a rink, I thought it would be fun to relive this blast from the past and excitedly sent in my RSVP. Just the thought of going skating again conjured up all sorts of memories: playing the hokey-pokey and hoping to win a rabbit's foot key chain instead of the crappy plastic skate one that always seemed to break within five minutes of my touching it; hoping my crush would ask me to skate during the couples' skate; agreeing to "go out" with a boy during a sixth-grade class field trip and then "dumping" him ten minutes later when I had a change of heart. As a fully-grown (well, almost) woman of 26, I wondered what the skating rink experience would be like now, and I was also curious to see if I would fall on my ass.

The scene of the birthday festivities was United Skates of America on Armenia Avenue, a rink, I was told by Ali's father, that had been around since he was a kid. And lemme tell you: for a rink that old, it was bangin'. Seriously! There's no other word to describe it. The floor was polished wood, much like in a basketball court, and skating on it was like flying. Honestly, I feel like I got gypped as a kid, because the rinks in Tallahassee and Perry were nowhere near as nice as that. In fact, they were the complete opposite: ghetto as hell. The floors were made of this gross blue concrete mixture, and I know for a fact that the floor in the Perry skating rink had chunks missing. They weren't huge chunks, but if a kid hit it just right, he'd be ass over heels in no time. And the skates you could rent at both places were a safety hazard in and of themselves: brakes missing, loose wheels, fraying shoelaces. But this place on Armenia? Skating paradise.

Bangin' skating rink

How nice the rink was caught me off-guard, but I really wasn't prepared for how...asshole-ish (I'm going for it) some of the kids were. They had no skating etiquette whatsoever! Since it had been awhile since Ali and I had skated, it took us some time to re-master the basics, like slowing down, braking, and steering, and until we got completely comfortable, we looked like two hunchbacked old ladies who were about to fall at any moment, trying to warn people by flailing our arms. It was wonderfully moronic, and it was a shame that Ali's mother didn't capture it on video (yes, her parents, two nephews and grandmother were there as well, and her mom videotaped us like we were ten). Considering how inexperienced we had to have looked, it would stand to reason that if you were a child, or simply anybody who skated frequently, you would steer clear to avoid a collision, right? WRONG. In fact, I think our lack of skating talent served more as a magnet because those little bastards would decide to dart out in front of us at the last minute, and then skate a little too close for comfort around the turns. And one idgit who almost caused a collision decided that it was our fault and declared war. After we all almost fell, he exclaimed, "Not cool!" and then would skate a ways, stop suddenly and turn around right as we approached (almost causing another accident) and say things like, "I'm watching you!" People, I shit you not. He looked to be about all of seven, and I swear to God had it not been time for him and his little friends to eat their pizza lunch, I would have tripped him, feeling no remorse whatsoever. He pissed me off that much. While he was the only kid to declare war, he was not the only kid with poor skating etiquette. I felt like I was in a weird, real-life game of Minesweeper, having to avoid hitting the children lest I get asked to leave for "being a bully."

Bangin' skating rink after the asshole kids arrived

But despite the asshole kids, Ali and I had an absolute blast. Some things were still the same, like the games and prizes, the food (best nachos ever) and those one or two people who liked to show off their mad skating skillz and do little tricks to make the rest of us hate them. We killed it in the arcade room, winning enough tickets so that each of Ali's two nephews could pick out a "good" prize (you know, the kind that takes hundreds of tickets to get). And, yeah--we fell on our asses. Hard. Then we just sat there on the skating rink floor for a minute or two, laughing them off, another moment that Ali's mother forgot to videotape. And after we left the rink that afternoon, we headed over to Ali's parents' house, where we celebrated Ali's birthday like actual grownups: with cocktails.

Birthday and Halloween Fun Or That One Time I Got the Plague

For me, October has always been somewhat of a magical month. Growing up, I would be so excited when it finally rolled around: my parents would dust off their Halloween decorations, my friends and I would excitedly talk about and plan our costumes, the air would finally get a little cooler, and everything just seemed to have a little extra sparkle. Halloween was one of those holidays where it seemed like anything could happen, and I always looked forward to the fun and mischief it would bring. Add to that the fact that my birthday is on the 30th (where not just candy but candy and presents were a sure-fire guarantee) and you probably have some idea of just how excited I was.

As an adult, I still look forward to my birthday, Halloween and October in general, but each year it seems like a little more of that magic I felt as a kid gets lost amidst the forty-hour work weeks, bills and other adult responsibilities that take up more and more of my attention. So this year, I decided to do something about it and reclaim the magic. And what better place to do that than at the most magical place on Earth? That's right--I'm talkin' 'bout Walt friggin' Disney World.

The night I saw the commercial about getting free admission to Disney on one's birthday, I just about tripped over my own two feet to get to the computer and register. Since then, I'd been waiting for October 30, 2009 to roll around with child-like anticipation, and when it finally came, my friend Kathy met me at my apartment and we set off together for the Magic Kingdom. I had high expectations. I hadn't been to Disney since my parents took me when I was four, so I was expecting wonder and awe. I was expecting to be transported to a place where fantasies were a reality, where people pooped sparkles and upchucked rainbows because everything was just that magical and marvelous. And it did not disappoint. We saw Pluto, Pinocchio and the Disney Princesses, walked through Cinderella's castle, spun ourselves dizzy on the teacups, and toured the planet on It's a Small World. We had a map and we had a plan, and we weren't leaving until we soaked up as much Disney magic as 11a.m.-9p.m. would allow for. And then somewhere between Tomorrowland and one o' clock that afternoon, the body aches and overall sense of feeling assy hit me--hard. Kathy noticed it when we took a break to eat lunch and she noticed I only ate half of my vegetarian wrap.

"You're not hungry?" she asked.
"I'm not feeling too well, actually," I replied. I then told her about the aches and ended with my resolve to just be a soldier and power through--after all, we were at Disney, and I wasn't planning on wasting my free ticket or her paid-for ticket just because I was feeling less than stellar. I mean, who knows when I'd get to go again? She seemed fine with that, so after lunch we continued on our journey around the park and ended the evening by watching the night parade.

By the time the night parade was over and we started on the trek back to my car, I was pretty much done for--the body aches had intensified, leaving me feeling like an old woman with sore joints, and they were joined by a mild fever and a bit of congestion. All I wanted to do was get home and pass out in bed. Kathy agreed to drive us back, and as soon as we hit the parking lot, I was fantasizing about reclining the seat back as far as it would go and passing out. Unfortunately, my stomach must have been fantasizing about emptying its contents, because, without warning, I projectile vomited--and it was not rainbows. I felt an odd mixture of physical relief, mortification, awkwardness and awe. I was mortified because I was in a public place, and I knew of at least two people who were trying to leave who got a front-row view of the show; awkwardness because I just threw up for the first time in front of Kathy, which brought us to a whole new level in our friendship; and awe because of how much distance my stomach gravy cleared from my mouth to its final resting spot on the asphalt.

Poor Kathy, though. Other than her kids, she doesn't do well when people get sick, and I didn't get enough of a chance to warn her. At the first "throw up" sound I made she exclaimed, "Are you gonna get sick?!" and then scrambled off to find some napkins when I started heaving. At the end she was just about as breathless as I was when she asked, "Are you okay?" her eyes a mixture of fear and bewilderment. She was a sport, though, and a good friend--she tried to drive in the far right lane of the interstate as much as possible on the way back, just in case I had another episode.

Saturday--Halloween--was more of the same, just without the projectile vomiting. I spent the entire day watching TV and movies and trying to move my head and body as little as possible, and added pizza to the routine later on that night. Luckily, I didn't get any trick-or-treaters--if I had, I'm sure they would have run screaming the minute I opened the door.

So that was how my birthday and Halloween went down. I can't say the weekend was a total waste--that Disney night parade was pretty awesome.