fenchurch | They say it's your birthday...

All in all, it's been a pretty good day, and I wanted to thank everybody for their good wishes!! (I'm still working my way through my flist to reply to them all.) And a big thank you to

slm76 for the e-card!

I went for low key this year... I started off with a one hour massage at Massage Envy then came home to spend an entire day being a complete bum. It's harder than it sounds! I had to continually remind myself not to do dishes or start a load of laundry or tackle the mess in the guest room, but it was nice to just spend the day being completely lazy and playing computer games. :-p

We had boy scouts in our backyard through most of the day, clearing away the massive blackberry jungle... They needed a fundraiser project to help pay for camp. We happened to have enough to cover what they needed, a forest of blackberries in need of removal and a desire not to do it ourselves. A perfect match! Although it was one more thing that I kept having to tell myself I absolutely could not help with (for more reasons than it being my birthday -- there's no way my shoulders would be able to handle blackberry removal).

They did a fantastic job... I think that's the clearest the Back Forty, as we call it, has ever been (it was a jungle when we bought the house and has gotten steadily worse over the years). I tried taking a picture, but it's gotten too dark out now for it to work well. The scouts are going to be coming back later this week to do a bit more work, but honestly, I think they've already more than earned their money!

For dinner, we headed over to Todai at Redmond Town Center... it's our favorite birthday restaurant, since dinner is free for the birthday girl or boy! I filled up on yummy sushi (especially the tako (octopus) salad), crab legs, and korean-style short ribs. Oh, and dessert... they had one of my two favorites (the other being simple cheesecake with fresh passionfruit squeezed over it) in little mini-ramekins! Crème brûlée!! They were teeny, probably about 1/8 cup of custard in each one. According to one of

rackham's co-workers, they're small enough that you can eat 30 of them before you get sick. We didn't try it, though.

Better yet, Rackham gave me the gift of a flame-thrower!! Okay, so it's actually a really nice kitchen torch... but it does mean that soon, I'll be able to make my own crème brûlée! *insert maniacal laughter here*

All in all, my birthday has definitely been of the happy!