Birthday

My birthday happened a couple of weebacks*. This year I turned 30, which I guess is supposed to make me feel old or something, but since I already fake turned 30** a year ago, this birthday didn't even phase me.

I tried to keep my birthday a lowkey affair, but somehow the word got out and I got dragged into random birthday festivities. The Sunday before my birthday I met JH's parents, her sister, and her sister's husband for dinner. JH's mom gave me an envelope of money which made me feel kind of bad because my sister-in-law's husband never gets anything from them. JH later told me that her parents think I am miserable here and must be lonely on my birthday and miss my hometown, which can apparently be cured with envelopes of money. Perhaps I need to act more Eyeore-esque around them...I could use a new lens for my camera.

On the day of my birth, I went to work like the responsible adult that I am. I used to like having my birthday in the summer, because as a kid it meant I could have a pool party, and I could play whatever Nintendo game I received all day. Couldn't do that any this year. At work I kept my head down and didn't say anything about my birthday, because I didn't want to have people buy me pity cake. I didn't get any pity cake, but I got two care cakes!

I'm guessing girl in accounting has a list of everyone's birthday somewhere and got a cake with company funds. The second cake came from people in the design department that I'm actually friends with (aka the kind of co-worker I would hangout with even if we didn't work together anymore). Two of them studied English with me years before I became an actual employee, so they might have recalled my birthday from that time, which made it all the more impressive.

At home JH made me some rocking dinner. We had some steaks and potatos and random vegetables as well as a bottle of wine. Everything was mad decent. Presents arrived during the weekend, and they were awesome!

First, signifying the fact that I'm 30 now and need to be a responsible adult was a tie-pin. Second, signifying the fact that JH and I make decent loot and should be able to enjoy "frivilous" purchases, was a Nintendo Wii.

The Wii is totally awesome. It's basically the perfect game system for married people who still enjoy each other's company. The amount of "party" games makes it perfect for those nights when the weather is too shitty to go out. The other thing that is awesome is the virtual console deal. I've been waiting for such a thing pretty much since Super Nintendo came out.

I had a lot of games for older systems that I like playing, but I don't like having a million gaming systems crowding up my entertainment center. Wii would have cleared away a ton of that clutter, but since I'm on the other side of the universe it has merely replaced games that I no longer have access to***.

The weather has been a heaping pile of shit, so JH and I have been putting the Wii to good use. We are all about Wii Sports and Bubble Bobble (the 1988 NES version). JH is way better than me at Wii Sports, but I still can rack up way more points in Bubble Bobble. This probably has more to do with the fact that she allegedly never played games before we got married than anything else, and I'm sure in a week or so I will have to hand over my Bubble Bobble High Score Trophy to her as well. When that day comes my friends, the only thing left for me to do will be to download Mario Kart 64 on the Wii, fire up Master of Puppets or Ride The Lightning and rock some Battle mode!


*For those of you that aren't my brother or my friend Pete, "weebacks" equals "weeks back." Back in the mid to late 90s when it was trendy to watch pro-wrestling, we did just that. WCW was our primary drug of choice and on one particular Monday night one of the announcers probably Tony Schivone, but possibly Mike Tennay, attempted to explain some event that had happened two weeks earlier, but what came out of his mouth was, "a couple of weebacks."

**In Korea you are 1 year old upon birth so people have told me I am 30 for over a year now.

***I actually have an old school NES here as well, so I haven't gotten too many NES titles besides a couple that I never actually owned before, or otherwise lost to time/needing money for CDs/guitars in high school.