happy birthday to me

tomorrow's my 35th birthday, so tonight chris & i went out on a date & brooke spent the night at a friend's house. i don't think we've had a date night where we didn't have to rush back to relieve the babysitter in years, so it was pretty fun & relaxing.

i made an extra effort to get pretty for my honey today. it's not very often that i put on a bunch of makeup & i might have overdone it a bit since a had a face full of enough cosmetics to coat several prom goers. i had a little photo shoot w/ myself before we left the house because i knew otherwise there'd be no pics to remember the night. plus, i love makeup & even an old barn looks better with a fresh coat of paint. sometimes i have a little too much fun when i get in front of a camera, even if i'm the only one in the room. the following photos can attest to that in a rather embarrassing way... (i recently read that when you look at a picture of yourself, you should judge it primarily based on if you look happy or like you're having fun rather than if you look pretty. so i'm now using that as a standard because i like it better than my old one)

we went to a nice restaurant for dinner, then out to see a stupid comedy & then headed home for a change of footwear so that we could go walking downtown. i wish i was one of those women who can strut her stuff all over town in funky heels, but alas, i need to strap on some birkenstocks if i'm going for a walk these days. and even then i'm kinda wishing for a gel insert.

i seem to have shrinking bladder syndrome (hence forth to be referred to as SBS) so i have to use pretty much every bathroom in any building we enter or even walk past. i'm worse than a toddler who's potty training & intrigued by bathrooms; even brooke gripes at me for having to go so often. tonight was no exception. i think i used 6 different public bathrooms & sometimes that's an adventure. i really don't like when i go into a stall & get myself situated & then the woman on the other side of the partition makes a phone call. i mean, it's bad enough that i'm in there & she's hearing my tinkling, but now her lover across the store is hearing it too. in one particular place, i walked into the ladies room for the inevitable rendezvous w/ the crapper & i was feeling a little gassy. i was thinking that i'd go in there & come out a few minutes later feeling lighter, less bloated & less likely to embarrass myself in front of my beloved. but as soon as i got my pants down, a woman walked in & dialed her phone. i think she must have been an employee because she didn't even use the facilities, just dialed & started chatting loudly. i was trying to wait politely for her leave before i released the gassy beast, but she wouldn't leave. and i can only hold it for so long when i'm in that position. i attempted the discreet cough & toot, but my timing was a little bit off. after that she switched to spanish & there was some laughing. eventually, when i determined that she was planning to spend her whole break in there talking about me, i figured i'd better just finish my business & go on, regardless of my pride. you can only hold back so much if you don't want that lingering pain. once i had thoroughly relieved myself, i decided that i couldn't bear to open the stall door & face her, so i waited a little bit longer. thankfully she left, but not before i'm sure chris was wondering if i'd been the victim of a bathroom mugging.

in yet another place where we stopped for drinks & dessert (just a lil fyi, blackberry mojitos don't compliment caramel fudgey brownies) my SBS got the best of me again & in this bathroom, there are 2 stalls together in such a way that the 2 toilets face directly toward each other with just a little partition between them. it's rather disconcerting when there's a woman on the other side of that partition & you're so close that your knees are almost touching. you could play footsies with each other if you were drunk enough or just feeling frisky. very strange. and for the record, i was neither drunk, nor frisky enough to go the footsie route w/ the woman on the other side.

on the way home, i was feeling all loose & foolish & chris turned up some old party tunes, so i was busting my best car dancing moves. i assure you, they were horrible, but i was enjoying myself immensely. so much so that i felt the need to break out the camera to document the ocassion. sigh... i'm so glad my husband loves me, in spite of my utter & complete lack of coolness.