I had a wonderful birthday yesterday!  Really lovely.  Perhaps it was because when your birthday’s on a Tuesday you have lowered expectations, but I thought it was pretty much perfect.  I got over 50 birthday greetings from people on Facebook which really made me feel appreciated, plus the myriad emails, texts, phone calls and flower/chocolate deliveries.  And then my co-workers baked brownies and cookies for me and had a little party at work.  I feel loved!

I left work early to go to the gym, but I was later than I had planned for so I didn’t really have time to workout much.  Which is fine, I mean, I could have skipped the gym entirely if I’d wanted to.  But I didn’t want to feel guilty on my birthday so I went.  And then we got home in plenty of time for me to get ready for dinner.  Our reservations were at 7:30 but I wanted to get there at 7:00 and have a drink at the bar.  We walked in the door precisely at 7:00 and sat at the bar (although we could have gone straight to our table, the place was far from full).  Our bartender gave excellent advice on wine and let me taste a couple. I settled on the Gavi, which is fast becoming a favorite of mine. I drink that at Fritti as well (not surprising since they’re connected).  We had a nice drink and a chat, and then we went to our table precisely at 7:30.  This pleases me because you know I like to be punctual.

We started with the steamed clams in a white wine sauce with garlic, tomatoes, mint and Calabrese peppers.  The sauce was perfect, flavored delicately and not over-powering.  The clams were small but tasty.  Dice really loved the sauce.  Then I had the old standby, the insalata mista, which is your basic romaine salad with onions, tomatoes and cucumbers.  Then I had tagliatelle in a carbonara, with peas, cream and cotto ham.  The pasta was cooked perfectly and the cream was delicious!  Dice had the risotto al frutti di mare which is risotto with mixed seafood.  I tasted the risotto, and although it was good, my dish was better.  However he said that the mussels were very good.  It seems that Sotto Sotto does shellfish very well.  After I cleaned my plate off and they cleared the table, I kept waiting for the dessert menu, because I deserve cake on my birthday, right?  Then the waiter came out with a slice of cake with a candle in it!  I haven’t blown out a candle in years!  So much fun, and such a nice surprise!

Then we went home where I opened presents.  Nothing special, but very nice gifts.  Dice got me paperback versions of two books which I’ve already read at the library but could not find paperbacks of because they were too obscure 19^th century British novels by a really obscure writer.  Since Dice is a rare book librarian trained to find such things, he managed to find the only used paperback edition of Self-Control by Mary Brunton, and one of the few used paperback editions of Discipline by the same author.  Both are fantastic books, and I only just finished Self-Control a few weeks ago and was wishing I could re-read the other.  And now I can!  Perfect, very thoughtful, gifts.  The kind of gift that proves the giver was really listening when you said you wanted something.

Dice is off today to Charlottesville for a few days, so we had to get up early to get him to the airport this morning.  Tonight the Commune is taking me out for my birthday.  We’re going to the $3 slider night at The Shed, which I’m excited about because they’ve added several new sliders for our delectation.  I’ll be sure to report tomorrow.

In fitness news, I had the MOST EXCELLENT run yesterday, although it was a short one.  After weeks and weeks of struggling with my speed I maintained at 8:50 for two miles, and could have done many more miles, but I ran out of time.  I haven’t had that kind of runner’s high since I ran my last half marathon!  Today I did 5 miles at 9:15, which is still really good and, actually, totally acceptable to me.  This makes me SO happy.  For some reason I just snapped out of my running funk, that’s the only way I can explain it!  Or, I guess it could possibly be all the cake, cookies and pasta I’ve eaten in the last 24 hours. Heh.