we pause for birthdays

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Beatrice and I share a birthday week and so we've been rather consumed these past several days with getting older and wiser and better looking and more like fine wine and all that sort of thing, if our loved ones are to be believed.

Beatrice's big day comes first. A couple of handsome chaps came all the way from Tennessee to help us celebrate her 17th. We plowed through enchiladas and rellenos at Chuy's Tex-Mex (the best!) and then surprised her with tickets to a stage production of Code of the Woosters over in Fort Worth. Muy spot-on, I say, wot?

A couple of nights later, they threw a spiffy party for my birthday. After regaling me with a rather Bugs Bunny-at-the-opera rendition of Happy Birthday and a bit of toasting (I do love being toasted, don't you?), there followed Some Golden Moments the details of which should and shall remain cloaked in the Hallowed Shrouds of Family Mystics.

Then the assembled revellers unwittingly performed a very fine pigs-at-the-trough impression over a communal and rather excessive banana split. (Please don't try this with strangers. It's a good thing that people you love don't have germs.)

On Friday night our entourage attended Fa's second major voice recital for the week (See Fa sing! See Fa sing during finals! See Fa sing Mozart in Italian and Bach in German when she can barely order a cheeseburger in English!). Our buttons were well nigh popped. Next morning we rolled out again to cheer Spuddy Buddy's basketball team through their last preseason game.

We also scrapped our way through two protracted, epic, to-the-pain Monopoly battles that advanced way into the wee hours. Ever tried playing with eight greedy lunatics players? It's nuts.

[Memo to players: We really should know better than to play with a career negotiator, hello. Who seeks not to win, like a normal human, but rather to get sick thrills avocational catharsis out of confounding every roll of the die with convoluted kickbacks and leveraged rent immunities and various other notwithstanding-the-foregoings heretofore without precedent in the history of Monopoly, and who, having thus created a level of perpetual chaos sufficient for his own dark amusement, announces that he just has to get some sleep and bails out of the game. And to think we fell for it twice in one weekend, O Best Beloveds. Silly us. And I bet we'll let him do it next time, too.]

I could post pictures of all this merriment, but someone must protect the guilty.

Speaking of pictures, we will snap Beatrice's annual birthday pictures and post them just as soon as a) we've recovered from the aforementioned merriment, and b) Beatrice has finished midterms and c) we three girly girls go to the superfoofoo salon on Saturday to get all dolled up for Christmas. Glee!
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