43rd Birthday: One of my best days

Today is my 43rd birthday. It's been a great day-- in fact, I was thinking towards the end of the day that today has been one of the best days of my life-- just a really solid day.

About eight years ago I wrote about an idea I had that religions should celebrate the one really good day that their Supreme Being had (when girls smiled at him and his car started on the first try) a lot more than the day He died in fearful agony (http://timothychenallen.blogspot.com/1999/06/really-good-day.html). Well, today was just that kind of good day.

I woke up next to Sònia, who has loved me for a really long time now. I gave her a kiss and then got up and ran my new favorite 10K route (http://timothychenallen.blogspot.com/2007/06/10k-route-starting-in-center-city.html) in a few minutes faster than I've done it before. Granted, it was a good deal slower than I did when I set my sub-40 P.R. when I was 25. But hey, I'm 43 now, so sue me. When I got home, Daniel was up and he and Sònia sang me "Happy Birthday". Then Daniel gave me a dinosaur figure that he painted himself. He liked how he had done that so much that he asked for it back, which was fine. Sònia gave me Neverwinter Nights: Diamond Compilation Pack (DVD-ROM), a video game based on Dungeons and Dragons, which I love, and Jack Black's Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny. Rock on.

We had my actual party at Franklin Park. Everyone who came spoke Spanish. Our Argentinean friends Martin and Paula, and our Venezuelan friends Ingrid and Roberto, and two Spanish folks, Rafa and Marga. I chuckled to myself at one point, thinking, "well, I guess I speak Spanish now". This is sort of the culmination of the dream of speaking Spanish that led me to move to Barcelona, Spain back in 1998, which led me to meet Sònia, which led to us getting married and having Daniel.... At the party we just sat and talked and laughed about everything. At one point we talked about ages (Sònia and I were the two oldest at 43 each) and I could remember the important things that had happened at each age-- at 35 I met Sònia... at 37 Daniel was born... at 39 we moved to New Orleans.

We got home and I played with Daniel for a while, then I fell asleep on the carpet of our living room. Ah.... We had dinner in the back yard with our neighbors, David and Olivia, who are great, and ate too much ice cream.

Now I'm going to get in bed and continue reading George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1), which has me totally sucked in. How I love my life....