Second Breakfast

As of 5:38PM yesterday I celebrated 36th birthday. This is an auspicious birthday, being the product of the squares of two primes. The next one I get is 100, so I tried to make the most out of this one just in case.

As befitting such an occasion, we celebrated with the traditional three days of festivities: Friday night at Cafe Felix with the combined Ann Arbor and Jackson contingents of friends (some of whom had never met, which I find a little shocking) and dinner at Palio; Saturday with a fabulous meal at Eve (the Restaurant); and Sunday with many of the same friends at Portage Lake (which unlike the rest of my birthday events doesn’t have its own web site, thank heaven).

The meal at Eve was particularly memorable - I had the lamb in brik, which features nicely spiced ground lamb with pinenuts in a phyllo-like pastry, topped with a generous salad of baby spinach and mint. The spicing on the lamb was excellent, and the overall dish was balanced, enjoyable to eat, and very satisfying. Alan had the tenderloin chimichurri - I tasted the chimichurri which was also very nice. We started the meal with a “Spa Martini” (which I’ll provide a recipe for tomorrow), and ended with their fabulous pots de crème.

All in all an excellent meal, and combined with the time with many great friends, the flowers from my mother, and the dozen cards wishing me well, a perfect birthday weekend.

I’m now finally contemplating the replacement of my aging ThinkPad laptop with a MacBook Pro. Dare I take the plunge back into Apple’s beautiful if closed garden?

P.S. - My husband and I apparently do actually share a brain. He penned this entry on our weekend celebrations pretty much at the same time as I did this one.

The past few months have been rather consumed with many work projects, church commitments, projects for More Light Presbyterians, travel, training, and just plain busy-ness.  So I’ve had little time or energy to engage here, and my several (one, two?) readers have gone without.  Alas.

I think I’m on the other side of things now.  Unfortunately my laptop’s fan decided it was “time to die” finally (it has been spinning more or less happily for four years now, so I forgive its new reluctance to keep it up), so I am sans computer.  Well, not entirely true given the Dell laptop at work (which never leaves the dock), and the Compaq Evo at home which is mostly a terminal to access the Internets and e-mail.

Here are the guts of my ThinkPad T42, which has been a very fine laptop despite its current challenges.  The heatsink fan (the copper-colored component) is quite a piece of engineering.  A bit of egg-carton-style packing foam makes a great screw holder.  Thanks to this site for notes on how to remove the palm rest.

I’ve been contemplating a new computer for a year or so, and thinking of taking the plunge back to Apple.  My first computer was a Mac IIsi, which my wonderful great-aunts funded despite its hefty price tag.  I loved that computer, and I wouldn’t be the big professional geek keeping my husband in the lifestyle he’d like to become accustomed to without that gift.  Apple is unlikely to rev the MacBook Pros anytime real soon, so now is probably as good of a time as ever.  And with Parallels I can have my MacOS goodness and my Windows XP work stuff all in one easy shiny package.  W00t!

Conversation this morning:

A: (Looking at yesterday’s mail) Well, I’m glad we got our Christmas cards done well before Christmas this year. Now everyone is sending us one since they got ours.

B: I hope all of our friends think “That Brian and Alan, they’re so organized. I wish we could be more like them. (In voice of fictitious straight neighbor or friend) Honey, we should be more like Alan and Brian.”

A: Well, they’re gay.

B: Well, indeed.

A: Anyways, that’s what I like about Christmas. Its the shaming and jealousy.

B: Indeed.

Yes I am a geek. For the uninitiated, these posters are a reference to some of the places and events key to Joss Whedon’s sadly-canceled Firefly series, and the Serenity movie that followed.

As my husband points out, one would have to be a college student to hang these without a bit of shame (the BSG ones are really cool as well), but I think they’d work in a TV/media room.

We do have a pair of the really cool prints from Bidlack’s “Old Ann Arbor” series in the back entryway to our house. I want the Monorail one for my birthday (Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!), and the airship one is quite nice as well (neither of which are shown on the site).