Birthday Forty-One

 Hello all.

As of 6:22pm EST last night, I am officially 41 years old.

I was born on a snowy Monday evening in a hospital in Morgantown, West Virginia. I looked like this:

Yeah, that's me.

I sent this picture to my parents this morning and said "someone really should have told this kid that it all goes downhill from there" or something to that effect.

We did not do much for my birthday. It was a very low-key affair, honestly. We'd made all of these grandiose plans to have fun and do fun things and in the end we never really did any of them. So here's how my birthday went, from the beginning to the end:

• 12am: I was asleep, having fallen asleep by 10pm the night before.
  
  
• 4am: I woke up, roughly, having a vague recollection of being so tired that I could no longer stay conscious before I had fallen asleep. I got up, took my pills, and played one of my games here on my PC.
  
  
• 6:30am: My dad tells me happy birthday via messenger. I reply to thank him and ask if they're both up (I didn't know if my mother worked yesterday or not due to the holiday schedule at the college she works at). No response. I text my mother and she says they're in the car on the way to work. I finish my previous post here about Christmas in the 80s.
  
  
• Sometime around 8am: Daisy wakes up and comes into my room to wish me happy birthday. She's still sick, but we make rough plans for the day -- we were planning breakfast at a place called The Brunch Box, downtown, then we had an errand or two to run before we were going to look at more kittens at the humane society. As Daisy was still not feeling great and neither is Mom, we postpone birthday dinner plans with the parents.
  
  
• 10:20am: After a lengthy search and deciding after numerous attempts that it was unwise to trust Daisy's GPS, we finally (easily) find The Brunch Box and have a wonderful breakfast of vegan/GF breakfast pizza, a hot vegan chicken-and-waffles sandwich, tater tots, and vegan frozen yogurt. It is easily one of the best pizzas I've ever had, period, ever.
  
  
• 11:50ish: We have completed breakfast and the errands we needed to run, and are on our way to the humane society -- there was a kitten there I wanted to see, a small black female kitten. Short-haired, but with deep blue eyes. I figured it was worth a shot. In the car, Daisy tells me I need to check, just to make sure, that she is still at the humane society and that she hasn't been moved to PetSmart, who also does adoptions for the humane society. She was moved, along with two little boys who were adorable and that Daisy wanted to see as well. However, she was moved to the PetSmart in Shadow Lake, which is about half an hour away from us. So we adjust the GPS to get us there and off we go.
  
  
• 12:20pm: We arrive at the PetSmart and are first in line to see these little cats. The little girl was adorable and very sweet, wanted all my attention and wanted to sit on my shoulders, but her eyes were not as blue as they'd previously looked (they were turning green, much like Pete), she wasn't a longhair -- which I knew -- and while she was sweet she wasn't hitting that "this is Empress" vibe for me. She was like 80% there but I didn't overall feel the entire connection. It has to be really right for me to want a cat and call her Empress, and I told Daisy that I'll know when I find the right one. The little boy Daisy looked at was sweet too, but very frightened and didn't want much attention or love. We left there with zero cats.
  
  
• 1pm-ish: Deciding to go to the humane society to see the other new kittens, we did -- to find the place crazy busy and crawling with people. We also saw multiple people walk out of the building with cats in boxes, too. There were a couple of really cute ones there we could interact with, but there were so many people around and we didn't even have a hint of the vibes for any of them. All of them got adopted by the end of the day. Before leaving the humane society, we take this photo together:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 2pm-ish: We were home once again. I had a bit of frustration, and it wasn't necessarily about the cats. I was losing energy like crazy and there was just so many things we could have done for my birthday or while we were out, but all of them felt like effort and like work. Like, we need some groceries, for example -- I need to spend about $200 or so on necessities for around the house and only make grocery trips in person once about every two months or so. I told Daisy that sounded like work and would take a lot of energy. There were the plans we'd had to go play mini-golf, which by the time we'd done everything else sounded like an extreme amount of effort. I don't know how I would've been able to do dinner with the parents in the evening if it were still on. 
  
  
• 3pm: Daisy gives me my birthday presents -- a sheet of stickers with Hank's face on them, a Cuisinart "Griddler" with waffle iron plates, and the newest edition of the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series -- a birthday/Christmas staple in this household. I am sort of overwhelmed; the Griddler was not cheap. I had planned to get it for Daisy for Christmas a few years ago and she told me no at that time. I had rarely thought about it since.
  
  
• 4pm-4:30pm: Sometime in here is when I pass the fuck out. During this time, Daisy cleans off the kitchen counters and sets up the Griddler, and vacuums the downstairs. I hear none of this -- I am dead to the world.
  
  
• 4am today: I wake up again. Birthday is over. My Fitbit tells me I actually slept 10 hours and 17 minutes.

I got close to 100 people who wished me happy birthday on Facebook in one way or another. I had a great meal. I got to play with kittens, I got a very expensive kitchen appliance, and I slept for over ten hours. All in all, I think that's a pretty good birthday.