Yes, today is my birthday. I hung one more year on the line. I should be depressed, my life’s a mess, but I’m having a good time.*

(Okay, so you’re supposed to sing that the day after your birthday, I know, but “yes, today” sounds almost like “yesterday”!)

Funny enough, I just discovered that on my 17th birthday (a day on which I was eating cake with my then-boyfriend at his family’s house, and a good year before I learned what email was–that didn’t happen till freshman year at U of I), the world wide web became available to the public on the internet. Not that the internet and the www didn’t exist before–it was just not available to anyone outside of a certain handful of researchers. Whaddaya know?

(As an aside, I feel like an old fogey when I tell people I read email during those early years on pine and elm (mostly elm), and that when I transferred to BYU two years later the trend hadn’t quite hit that campus and they claimed that if I wanted an email account, I’d have to switch my major to computer science. No wonder all the people I’d met via the internet (usenet!) from BYU at the time were all CS majors. And I once upon a time also typeset college textbooks in Unix, which was why I could understand elm. I think it was called elm. I remember being so jealous of the people working on humanities texts (I worked on physics and mathematics texts) because they could use that program that had just come out called Quark. Because my texts were so complicated, what with all the formulas, I had to stick with Unix till Quark got powerful enough.  Wow, I’m getting old. Which is what, I suppose, birthdays are all about.)

In the ongoing saga of my shoulder, the CT scan confirmed that yes, indeed, I have a fractured shoulder. Happy birthday! Now I have to go to the orthopedist about it, but I couldn’t get an appointment for another week, so in the mean time I’m just supposed to not use that arm.

Have I mentioned I’m right-handed?

But I took Monday off (well, today, still, because I haven’t gone to bed yet, but it is officially Tuesday now). And I did absolutely nothing all day. I slept in, I read, I talked with a couple friends. My roommate made me birthday cake so we can eat it in the morning because we’re going to see The Bourne
Supremacy tomorrow night (I love those movies!). But I gave her the recipe from memory and my faulty memory forgot to mention it needed 2 eggs, so we have an eggless cake which is even more dense than it usually is. But that’s good, because hey, I like chocolate chip cake dense. (It’s a recipe my grandma latched onto as the easiest birthday cake ever, which has become the traditional birthday cake in my family. Now it doesn’t feel like a birthday without chocolate chip cake! And it’s so easy, you can make it right in the pan. If you want the recipe, I’ll edit and add it.)

But tomorrow is back to work! Meetings and editing and such, life as usual. It really is a nice treat, though, to get to take your birthday off (or at least, a day near your birthday). The day of extra rest was welcome–especially while I’m not supposed to be using this stupid arm.

*ETA: If you don’t automatically start hearing Paul Simon singing when I say that, be aware that I’m not depressed and that my life isn’t a mess–but I am having a good time. 🙂