it's my (41st) birthday

happy 41st birthday to me
Happy 41st Birthday to me!

And, as with every year, happy birthday to Johan Paulik, Taylor Hanson, Michael Caine, Chris Klein, Albert Einstein, Corey Stoll, Daniel Gillies and for the second time, Jamie Bell.

It's been a funny old day really. Very busy, lots of shopping, lots of fun stuff. And it ended brilliantly.

I started the day off on my lonesome... Ma was getting her hair did this morning, so I was flying solo at the supermarket. But as I came downstairs, I discovered that the workmen fixing the roof, who I assumed had finished as of yesterday, were back again today. And they were blocking my car in. Thankfully they weren't already on the roof, so it was easy enough to sneak my car out.

The supermarket safari was pretty standard, I didn't even buy myself anything special or fancy (if you don't count a giant jar of Nutella, which I'm not counting, so shush), I just tootled around and then, after a brief but pointless detour into Target, came home again.

Normally, having people tromping about of my roof, screwing things, drilling things, just generally making noise would drive me crazy, but because they weren't doing it constantly, plus I know that it's actually something that will benefit me, it really didn't bug me at all.

Once I'd unpacked the groceries, I went though and tidied up the apartment, and hung up the now framed Le Gateau Chocolat poster I got out of the local gay paper. It looks pretty good under the Macbeth poster from The Bunker Trilogy last year too.

I also got the left over birthday cake from last year out of the freezer... and, clearly that cake is some sort of witchcraft, because after sitting in my freezer for over twelve months, it tastes just as good as it did when it was fresh. Amazing.

Then Ma finally arrived... and brought presents!

my birthday presents 2015my birthday presents 2015 (post shopping edition)
On the left, birthday presents from Ma... on the right, my ill-gotten shopping booty using a combination of birthday money, Christmas money and that general "leftover" money that I tuck away at the end of each week.

Given that I still hadn't spent the Christmas money from La Cousina, and I had some birthday money to spend, I figured I would finally get around to buying the Emmett Construct-O-Mech set I've essentially been obsessing about since we saw The Lego Movie.

Weirdly, I'm going to go from having no Unikitty figures to having three, since these two sets both have one, plus there's one in the set I bought myself last weekend.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We decided to start off at Arndale, so we headed down there, poked around Big W, then I got drawn into EB Games since they're having a Buy 2, Get 1 Free sale... So I decided to branch out from the Assassin's Creed franchise, and I bought Red Dead Redemption, Heavy Rain and BioShock Infinite, all of which I hear great things about. Plus those should keep my occupied for a good long while, since I'm kind of plodding through the first Assassin's Creed game at the moment, and I have Assassin's Creed Rogue waiting for me as well.

That was pretty much it for Arndale, so we then headed down to West Lakes, to do a price comparison on the Construct-O-Mech set, since I was sure we'd seen it somewhere slightly cheaper the other week.

I also wanted to have a quick look for either of the Terry Pratchett mini-series, The Colour of Magic and Going Postal, since I don't own good copies of either.

It just so happened that JB HiFi was also having a sale, plus they had the third season of The Legend of Korra right out there calling my name. So I managed to get that and Going Postal. Had I been properly paying attention at the time, I would also have grabbed the third season of Teen Wolf, since I keep wanting it to come out as one DVD set, but the season itself was basically two regular seasons long, so it makes perfect sense that they're not going to lump it all together.

Anyway, once we'd done all our intended errands (including grabbing my free birthday Boost Juice), we grabbed a little bit of sushi and then headed back to my place.

We had some time to kill, so after having them sitting on my TV table for the last month and a half, I popped in the DVDs for Sound and Fury's "Testaclese and ye Sack of Rome", which I bought last year and just never got around to watching. It's very filthy, and given how much I adore Sound and Fury, it was an enjoyable way to spend part of the afternoon. Then I broke out the Gravity and Other Myths DVD from the first show of theirs we saw, Freefall. The quality of the recording isn't completely brilliant (to be honest, the Sound and Fury one is better, but not by a ton), but it was interesting to see what they still do and what they've developed from those humble origins into their current (and fantastic) show. And we had some cake.

Once they were done it was pretty much time to get organised and go and get some dinner before the evening's entertainment, so we headed into the city to Jamie's Italian.

If we'd been thinking about it properly, we would have booked. Hell, I went past the place on Friday after work (which isn't my usual route), and could have dropped in then, but I wasn't sure exactly what we were doing, so I left it in the proverbial lap of the gods.

Turned out that went we rocked up there was a two hour wait for a table, so since we didn't actually have a backup plan, we decided to just grab some food at the bar, where there's no waiting for a spot.

It was actually a pretty good decision I think. We got fancy non-alcoholic cocktails (well, I say fancy, they were fancier than what we usually drink), then decided on the same plank we had last time, which is very tasty, along with some of their baked mushrooms, which are also really, really nice. I was glad my brain went with that at the last minute while I was ordering, because the women next to us had a number of the other bar items, and some of them were just a little strange looking.

We both finished it off with the Tutti Fruiti pie... sure, there may be other desserts on the menu, but screw that says I... I could eat that every time I go and be a very happy man (although I will say that the meringue top wasn't quite as fancy looking as previous iterations). I also went with my current obsession of an affogato... although after eating my slide of pie and finishing off the last bit of Ma's after she couldn't fit another mouthful in, my affogato was essentially just coffee, and not the least little bit sweet. Tasty as hell though.

And then it was off to the Entertainment Centre for the "Danny Elfman's Music from the Films of Tim Burton" concert. But I think that might need it's own post, and that may actually have to wait until tomorrow since it's very late.

Suffice to say that it was amazing, and whatever deity was looking after me enough to give me front row tickets deserves a votive offering of some sort.

It has been, in point of fact, A Very Good Day.

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