out of the womb and into the void

Thanks to everyone who left well-wishes in comments, on facebook, or on voicemail! It means a lot to me :)

Alas, it is no longer my birthday :( I'm apparently just like a little kid - I woke up early this morning and was too excited/happy to go back to sleep, so I took the time to blowdry my hair and iron my skirt (both of which were extremely abnormal activities). I went to work, had a reasonable day at the office, and was taken to lunch by Heather, which was nice. It's strange that we get free ultra-gourmet food every single day, and yet eating out at a run-of-the-mill Thai place is a treat.

In the afternoon, I had my standard weekly team meeting, and the team surprised me and Tolu (whose birthday was yesterday) with cake and champagne delivered by our director and his admin. So we sat around for half an hour chatting and eating one of the best cakes I've had in awhile - Cold Stone's ice cream/butterfingers cake. Mmm. I'm also pleased to report that I can now drink champagne again, despite the debacle at the beginning of July in which I drank two full bottles of champagne and had to be at work the next morning. Yay.

After work, I drove up to the evil city and had dinner at Little Star Pizza with the remaining core of my original college friends - Vidya, Adit, Oniel, John, and Jess. A good time seemed to be generally had by all, except perhaps by Oniel - he arrived late with the flimsy excuse that Google Maps had lied to him (impossible!), and then was not happy when we nearly voted on and ratified calling him 'Fauxneil'. We spent about twenty minutes trying to come up with another nickname for him, which resulted in many inane and hilarious suggestions (one of my favorites was Bill Crosby). I think 'Oniel No Deal' won, although I personally guess that Fauxneil is the one that is going to stick - any previous person in the group who has vehemently opposed a nickname has ended up stuck with it (see 'Santy Claude' and 'Swamplestiltskin' as examples).

But, it was nice to spend some quality family time with that particular group of friends, even if our numbers have shrunk considerably. Time was, I could easily get up ten or fifteen people to see a movie - granted, that was before I burned through a lot of goodwill by conning people into seeing 'King Arthur', but it's just not like it used to be. All sorts of great people have moved away - Emily, Walter, Ritu, Renee, Tammy, Chris, Zach, Felicia, Nita...the list actually goes on and on, and I know I'm going to offend a dozen people because I inadvertently left them off the list, but so be it. The latest and saddest departure was Claudia - it's been three weeks since I've seen here, which is probably longer than any period since I got back from Dublin. We toasted her memory several times tonight, a trend which I'm sure will continue.

Okay, I'm exhausted, so it's time for bed. Goodnight!