Birthday wrap-up

Sweet merciful crap! I turned 41 last week!

This is what 41 looks like – no makeup:

That was taken on the train platform.

WM got me a lovely Fossil charm bracelet.

I wanted a charm bracelet, but not a Pandora one because those are so expensive and only start looking good once you get 4 or 5 beads on it. This is stainless steel, so I don’t have to worry about dinging it. It’ll also be a source of no-brainer gifts for me as the years go by. (Just get me a charm.) The love charm is self-explanatory, and the owl charm reminds me of the scholar I married.

I can confess here that I wanted to make cake pops to bring into work, but the logistics of getting them there in one piece scared me away. Instead, I brought in some donuts from Federal Donuts on Sansom Street.

While I waited for them to be made, they gave me one free to try. This was strawberry-lavender — a flavor that seemed a bit scary but was SO GOOD!

When I made it to work (a little late, but HEY GUYS FRESH HOT DONUTS!) I found cupcakes from coworker DR:

My cubicle was decorated:

(note the eye-candy)

And waiting for me was a handmade card featuring none other than Bill Clinton!

And you’re all, “Wait, aren’t you a Republican or a Libertarian or WHAT are you again anyway?” (Answer: I’m a social liberal and a fiscal/defense conservative so I fit in with neither major party. I registered as a Libertarian a few years ago, and I count myself one of their less-extreme members.)

Bill Clinton came up a few weeks ago, and I mentioned that I missed young, meat-eating, sax-playing Bill Clinton. Speaking of being 41 and decrepit, you need to know that the college students I work with had no idea Bill Clinton played the saxophone, and had never seen the Arsenio Hall show clip. So I had to gather them around and show them. Bill *still* has a way with college ladies.

So my birthday card featured young, hot, meat-eating Bill Clinton! And Socks the cat.

I also received a lovely purple scarf courtesy of coworker DB (I work with more than one D) which I don’t have a picture of. But I wore it to my 3-hour meeting with an outside consultant. Nobody blinked twice. Couple that with the accidentally mismatched earrings that nobody mentioned either, and you can safely conclude that I have failed in hiding my freak flag at my new job. It didn’t even take 18 months for my facade to crumble.

Dinner was at the Tortilla Press, and I have no pictures of that either because I was too busy eating and smiling. I scored enough DSW gift cards to buy a pair of slamming black boots.

When I was in college, I wanted to be a talk show host. I preferred radio, but I’d have settled for television. I wanted to live in New York or LA or Boston and have piles of money and celebrity. For many reasons that never came to pass. The decades flew by and here I am — a mere office worker still in New Jersey. I didn’t land very far from the nest, and I didn’t make any “50 under 20/30/40” list. About ten years ago I realized that I never was going to have that big life that I initially wanted. But I vowed to myself that I was going to take this small life I was given, and live it as BIG as I possibly could.

Looking at the BIG love I felt on my birthday — from family, coworkers and friends both in person and in pixel — I know I’m doing something right with my little BIG life.