Happy Birthday to Me!

So even though my birthday is today, Mondays aren’t always conducive to adequately celebrating, so over the weekend Dan and I headed north, to where we went to high school and where some friends still live now, and spent the weekend with them. Of course, it started with a nice long car ride of about two and a half to three hours, but that gave me ample time to begin reading Divergent, which is exactly what I did. We also stopped at a coffee & book shop along the way and I got probably one of the best hot chocolates I’ve ever had.

When we got up there, our friend Katie, whom we were spending the weekend with, was still at work, so we stopped for some lunch and ice cream at one of our favorite restaurants. Here you can see my plaid-shirt-wearing, bearded manly-man of a boyfriend, Dan, and my lunch, which was a portobello bruschetta sandwich on sourdough. It was everything I hoped it would be and just as delicious as I remembered, seeing as we hadn’t been to the restaurant in a few years.

We then met up with Katie at her work and she showed us around there for a while. I even challenged her to sell me something in the store, and there was a lot of interesting stuff, but it was definitely out of our price range. I think my favorite, though, was a papier mache Bassett hound. It was sculptured so it was scratching one of its long, floppy ears. Twenty minutes later, we met up with Katie’s boyfriend and all headed to a place to paint pottery for a little while. I worked on a bowl, as you can see above, which turned out pretty simply, but I think I’ll be really happy with it when it arrives (because the shop offered shipping, so that’s what Dan and I got). Dan also painted himself a really cute brown mug, which you can see to the left behind my bowl. He painted some trees and birds on it too, and although the birds came out a little odd–and comically so, because they were supposed to be the most basic “m”-shaped birds–I think it’s really cute.

Following the pottery painting adventure, the four of us went to Funspot, which if you don’t know is the largest arcade in the world, and I highly recommend you go if you ever get the chance because it’s both cheesy and wonderful. There’s an entire upper floor of old video game machines, including three or four version of Pac-Man, Pong (which was out of order), a couple of different Super Mario Bros., The Real Ghostbusters, Galaga, Centipede, Space Invaders… So many, I could probably go on for hours talking about them. The second floor has a lot of more modern/recent games, like ones you might see in the mall, but it also had The Addams Family pinball, which is by far my favorite, and I have no idea how I didn’t get a picture. (Yes I do: I was having too much fun!). My dream one day is to have the money to get my own Addams Family pinball machine.

At the end of the night, Dan and I had almost 900 tickets to cash in for…candy. Honestly, the majority of the prices I got were all the cheap candy ones because they were more fun than the ones with higher ticket prices. I did leave with a shot glass, though, because it’s a cute little souvenir.

We ended the night at Katie’s new house, watching “The Wolf of Wall Street” (which I wasn’t impressed by) and lounging around with her and one of her cats. And yesterday we flopped around the house a while, watching “Frozen” and some shows on Hulu–I am so happy I finally saw “Frozen”! It was super cute and want to add it to my movie collection eventually. After a lunch of Chinese food eaten lazily on the air mattress, we went out to pick up one geocache, take a drive around the lake, and finally Dan and I headed home.

As for today, I’m just going to try to get myself outside for a run, then come back and do a little bit of work so I can try sending out something else for publication at the end of this week or next.