I have ABSOLUTELY no idea how it is that a whole 24 hours passed between this update and the last one. None whatsoever. Really.

I was up for a while after my last update, but it was "up" in the most limited of senses. I was vegging out at the television and the boy and playing card games against the computer. It was not any kind of fruitful consciousness. I went to sleep around 2 or 3.

Woke up around NOON or ONE this afternoon. I was a leetle tired, methinks.

Woke up remembering (remembering being a very nice euphemism for stepping into lakes of pee) that there is simply no way I can get around the fact that my dog is having a urinary tract infection relapse. We get to visit the vet tomorrow for more meds. Ick. Poor baby, I really do feel terrible for her...she hates this. She feels guilty for peeing, and she's all anxious all the time because she feels like she has to pee really bad but she doesn't want to...it's no fun for anyone.

Fooled around a bit at home, and mopped up lakes of pee etc., headed into office.

Got emailed around six or so by the guy I was supposed to have dinner tonight asking about where/when to meet. This caused me to actually *recall* that I was supposed to do something tonight. I'm just getting flakier and flakier these days.

Perfectly fine evening. Nice guy. Generally I enjoy his company all right, although I must say that it doesn't make all that much of a difference in my life whether or not he's in it. But I like him fine. He's got a fiancee on the west coast that sounds like she would probably be a nice person, and we talk about work and lives and things. He's smart and so on. But he is sort of a standard cosmopolitan sort of male person. Eh. I shouldn't be so harsh. He really is a good guy.

We went to his "club", hilariously enough. At least he's human enough to find this equally hilarious. It's a little modern, but not very. Brooklyn, which is way better than a Manhattan club. But my god, did the dinner suck. The appetizer was asparagus soup. Which they made with flour. FLOUR. IN THE SOUP. Not to mention the green food coloring. Ew. It did not taste like asparagus soup. It tasted like something I ought to have been making into crafts if I was four.

I am fairly certain the pasta sauce was Ragu. But it was way more edible than the soup.

Funny sort of thing, though, these clubs. I have not been to many. And in my neighborhood, the social clubs we have? They are the sort that if the door is open, one does not look straight in. *Our* social clubs have names like the Garabazzo Social Club. They are little storefronts with terrifying elderly men inside playing cards that one definitely does not look straight at. Our social clubs can have you killed.

This one was not like that. Big, old, gorgeous building. Once was clearly inside also beautiful, has gotten decrepit. Funny, not overly likeable white people inside. Two of the women sitting near us while we played cards (it's what one DOES in a club) were talking the whole time about Quilting. Yep, quilting. I couldn't really much relate to that. If I ever Quilt, somebody come along and shoot me because I will have lost my mind.

The sort of people that you actually kind of *wish* were serial killers because at least that would explain some things. And make them more interesting.

My god, when did I get so bitter and nasty?

I don't know. But I am sitting here and I don't honestly feel all that much rancour. I don't *feel* hatred or even much bitterness towards these people. Mostly they feel...dull to me. But when it comes to writing about them, writing here, all this stuff comes out. Don't know where it comes from. Maybe it's just representative of a whole lot of things and people that I don't particularly want to have to deal with or think about.

Eh. At any rate. I'm sure they have perfectly lovely and happy lives, and care about their loved ones and all that. More power to 'em, or something like that.

Not much else to say. Not certain where this last 24 hours went on me. Time just keeps moving faster and faster.

Speaking of which. Birthday is happening very soon. Tomorrow I have many birthday things Happening. And even Sunday.

Boy has great problems with the gift thing. If it doesn't occur to him months in advance, it frequently doesn't happen. He has a very hard time coming up with things that would be reasonable.

To give him some credit, as I have mentioned, I am a terribly hard person to buy for. Clothes don't work, I need to pick them out. Music, sort of the same. Books, nobody could buy me books unless I asked for something specific. For one thing, I've read a lot of stuff. For another...anything I haven't read is unlikely to be something I want to read. I don't have many hobbies. Techie stuff isn't really very appropriate, and anyway there aren't many new gadgets I'm all that interested in that are under exorbitant prices.

So the other day I told him that for my birthday what he could do is drive me up to connecticut to pick up the baby girl Tiny Marsupial that I'm getting for our current Tiny Marsupial to hopefully be his friend and girlfriend. With luck that is what we will be doing tomorrow.

Then, in the evening, we have to go to my parents' house for dinner and, of course, The Cake. Because Lord knows that I cannot pass a year without a Cake and the associated recollections of the 36 hours of back labor my mother went through to squeeze me, breech, into this world. Let alone the subsequent 8 or 9 months of screaming I achieved with the main result of my mother losing 40 pounds and much of her hair.

My mother is a Mother. With a great, big, calligraphic capital "M".

So the Birthday Moment is inescapable.

It's better now. These days, I don't have to have the Birthday Moment on my *actual* birthday. Which is new, over the past 2 or 3 years. Now we can do it a day or so before or after.

So that's that. Birthday is always so damn busy, why is that?

- onehanded