Pillowpants sez "Happy Birthday!"

The best-laid plans of mice and men... are pretty much fucked as soon as you make 'em, at least if the weather has anything to do with it. That, I shoulda known from the get-go. What I also should be learning, however, as I grow yet another year older and about a month wiser, is that that's not always a bad thing. Sometimes the unplanned occasions are just as much fun if not more. Like duh, grasshoppah.

The Plan was to celebrate my birthday by spending Saturday afternoon hanging out at Ye Olde Worlde Kicketh-Ass beer garden in Astoria. But all week the weather reports kept growing more dire, until finally on Saturday morning they were forecasting not only a 70% chance of thunderstorms but STRONG storms with a National Weather Service warning of dangerously high winds. OK, geez, talk about overkill. So the beer garden got pushed back to Sunday, even though that weather report was hardly ideal itself. Then I pouted and had a mini temper tantrum, since I'm pretty much the anti-matter version of Hannibal Smith: I hate it when a plan doesn't come together. And it was my birthday! Waaah! Neither L. nor I could think of anywhere else to go on Saturday instead, so in sheer desperation I decided we might as well see "Clerks II" and sent out an e-mail. Didn't really even expect anyone to join us. L. and I set out and to cheer me up he took me to Sarabeth's for brunch, which worked wonders. Carbs -- nature's mood elevators. (Wait, actually that's literally true.) And then D. and A. and ML and T. and U. and her man J. and his friend I. all showed up at the movie theater, and the movie turned out to be hilarious. Hilarious. In fact, if you don't understand the title of this post, get thee to the movie theater immediately, cuz I'm not gonna spoil it for you. And then afterwards U. awesomely invited us all back to her place, where we proceeded to sit around and drink all her wine while eating the cheese T. mysteriously produced and the cookies D. gave me as part of my b-day present. Thanks, U.! Can you believe she wound up hosting my impromptu birthday only two weeks after hosting her own? What a gal. We all went out to dinner around 10 o'clock but I don't really remember much since we were well-drunk by that point in the evening. But the whole thing was a blast, and the point is: I have the best friends. Sniff.

On Sunday the weekend o' birthday rolled on. The day started off less than promising, weather-wise, but by the time we were due to meet at the beer garden it had cleared up beautifully for us, with blue skies and little puffy white clouds. A whole 'nother bunch of folks were nice enough to change their plans and come on Sunday to celebrate (with a couple of repeats -- hi again, D.!), and we sat in the tree-shaded garden and ate yummy greasy kielbasa and I got to try a dark hefeweizen beer, which I had never had before -- less bitter than regular dark beer, I have to say. Somehow we wound up playing such a vigorous game of Fuck, Marry or Kill* that neighboring tables were eavesdropping on us in horror (I think the most difficult round was "Freddy Krueger, Jason, and Mike Myers"). And, lo, 'twas also a blast and so I wound up with two birthday parties and the weekend was way more fun than if it had proceeded as planned. Except of course for those people who couldn't make it to either one -- we missed you! Hope you had just as much fun doing whatever you wound up doing, and hopefully I'll see ya the next time a plan falls apart.

* When given three names, everyone has to say which one they would fuck, which one they would marry and which one they would kill. And why.