Another birthday come and gone. I'm 28 now. I've never been one to be particularly interested in my age; it doesn't bother me that I'm getting older as it does some of my friends. I have some friends who really don't like it when they're reminded of their age. Or when they have a birthday and you say something like, "Hey, almost 30, huh?", they get depressed. The way I figure, if I wasn't getting older, I'd be dead, so it's best to celebrate it. Sure, I might not be accomplishing everything I'd like to be, I might not be where I'd "hoped" I'd be at this age, but that's ridiculous anyway. Hopefully, I'll never be completely satisfied, and to have specific expectations for where I should be and what I should be doing at any particular time in my life is ludicrous. So screw it and happy birthday to me.
My birthday week ended spectacularly. Liz, all hail The Liz, planned, organized, and executed a surprise birthday party camping trip with a bunch of our friends in western Jersey. When we left the house Saturday with a car full of gear, I was a bit suspicious, but she had me going completely when we arrived at the Mohican Outdoor Center, ostensibly to scope out a spot for her to take her El Puente kids (El Puente is an alternative school in Brooklyn where Liz volunteers once a week). As we walked up the hill to see the group camp site, I was still under the impression that we were going back down the road a bit to meet our friends. I noticed a tent behind the shelter and said, "Oh, there are people back here." Just then, a loud raucous from the woods as Dave, Cass, Luke, Ilio, Cher, James, Patti and Kris strummed guitars and banged on drums to surprise me. It was wonderful. Even though I knew somewhat what was going on, in the end I was completely surprised. Sometimes it's nice to have a girlfriend who's such a good liar. I even bought the fake phone call to Luke from the car.
For the rest of the afternoon, we drank, ate, swam in the freezing lake, and, of course, played volleyball. Naturally, there was a volleyball net anchored to two tires in the field by our campsite. I never noticed how ubiquitous a sport volleyball is until I started playing. As night fell, A.J., Julie and Molly showed up, and we returned to the fire, cooked some more, and sang and played into the night until Scott the Campsite Dude made us stop. It was his birthday too, so we gave him a piece of cake. It's too bad we had to stop, we were just getting into a decent vocal jam.
As predicted, it started raining at exactly 1am, so we all quickly retreated to our tents. My trusty old Eureka leaked on us, though, so it's curtains for that old friend. It was about time for an upgrade anyway. I could easily get into a dangerous outdoor gear habit if I'm not careful. Arguably it's more constructive than some of my other habits.
Speaking of expensive habits, I still have yet to get my recording goodies up and running. I haven't had much time to fiddle with it, though what fiddling I have done has been less than encouraging. I had the stuff installed yesterday, but my computer kept crashing. This morning it lost track of it's boot drive, a very bad thing. I was staring at it, about ready to cry, lamenting my stupidity for not having Emergency Repair Disks (it's on the list.. I'll do it tomorrow), about to face up to the horrible task of reinstalling the operating system and recovering all of my data, when it occured to me that I should probably make sure it's not fixable. I shut old Betty down and ripped that card out, and sure enough, booted right up.
My theory is that it was an IRQ conflict, which is geekspeak and not worth getting into. Suffice it to say, I have another 8 days or so to try to get it working right before we can't exchange it.
