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very large glass of bourbon and obscene refrigerator magnets
Sunday, February 16 2025
Gretchen was puttering around this morning when I finally got out of bed. By then she'd built a fire in the woodstove, heated me up a croissant, made me a french press of coffee, and made smoothies as well. The reason I didn't have to do anything was that it was my 57th birthday. Otherwise, though, it was fairly conventional Sunday morning. Meanwhile outside rain was falling on several inches of slushy snow that had fallen overnight.
In the late morning I took a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine to make my birthday a little more entertaining and to also suppress my phlegm production. It was on a downswing, but having to blow my nose every half hour was an annoyance I didn't want on my birthday.
At some point Gretchen made me my birthday pizza (since I prefer that to cake), and I ate a couple slice of that. Gretchen was disappointed with it; she'd bought the dough at Hannaford and found it tasteless, and she also thought it was undercooked. "It's not my best work," she sighed, and the blamed it on being ill and (perhaps the stress of the last several days, which she made a point of not bringing up at all today).
Later I made myself gin-containing birthday drinks and watched YouTube video from the beanbag in the laboratory until it was time to drive to Bearsville for my birthday dinner at the Bear Cantina, which we decided to do early due to the shitty weather.
Originally I'd just wanted to keep my birthday dinner small, but somehow eight people ended up coming, which as fine. This was because I'd told Ray and Nancy they could bring various other people I don't know so well such as their teenage nephew Sven and a guy whose wife they'd gone to college with named Michel. Also in attendance were Jeff & Alana and Greg and Lynn. We had pretty good banter at our table, which I didn't contribute much to. I'd ordered a pitcher of margarita, which Nancy and Michele helped me drink while Greg and Jeff got their own booze and Ray drank diet Cokes. As for gifts, Ray gave me one of his abstract paintings a $100 gift card for the Bear Cantina, and then, at the end, a very large glass of bourbon on the rocks, while Alana and Jeff gave me some magazines from Alana's new (and somewhat anachronistic) magazine store. And Lyn and Greg got me a box of obscene refrigerator magnets.
At the end of the meal, Gretchen put a candle on one of the cakes her parents had brought up from Washington DC in late November and everyone sang the song people sing on such occasions. To minimize the spread of viruses, instead of blowing on the candle, I pinched it out with my fingers.
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