My Wild and Crazy Birthday Week

Cupcake from coworker

Warning: very long and boring post ahead.

As some of you know, I had a birthday last week ~ one person called it a milestone birthday. Yeah, I guess, if milestone means Medicare then death. But anyway, let's not be morbid. My new Rx plan is fab! I paid $30 for sumatriptan instead of $45, woohoo! Then I bought more puzzles because that $15 was burning a hole in my cyberwallet. Here's the weird thing about all my birthday celebrations: I don’t particularly care about my own birthdays, nor do I go out of my way to announce them for gift-grabbing purposes. Hey, if you do, no issues. I just don't, that's all. In fact, I am so anti-gift grabby that I refused to have a wedding registry or baby shower/s. That's just me; I find it embarrassing. Others don't feel that way, including my own daughters, and that's cool. 

So, at the beginning of April, one generous friend decided we should have a party for me at his house on April 25. I was fine with that, as long as the invitations specified "no gifts." They did, and all was good there. We watched the musical version of Waitress, which was great, just like the reviews said, and then we had pie to go with the theme. Fun evening with good friends, plus I met the host's new doggo, a very sweet Golden Doodle.

On Tuesday, we all have lunch together at work courtesy of the partners, and since so many of us were there last week, one of my coworkers made adorable cupcakes in honor of my birthday, and they all sang HB. The cupcakes were supposed to be reminiscent of Sprinkles (RIP), and honestly they were better! You guys know how much I loved Sprinkles, but sometimes their cake was too dense and oily. My coworker's cupcakes had light, fluffy cake, which is a better vehicle for frosting because you don't feel as barfy afterward. Dense cake gets into muffin territory anyway, and we don't want to go there. 

That seems like enough celebrating of me, but no, not even close. On Thursday, my actual birthday, three (3) coworkers brought me bouquets of flowers. Each one was gorgeous, and I felt overwhelmed. One coworker bought my lunch (salmon bowl) that day too. I brought the bouquets home because I wasn't returning to the office until Tuesday and wouldn't be able to appreciate them if I had left them there. I set them around my living and dining rooms. Utterly gorgeous! I don't know why I forgot I was allergic to flowers, probably because I receive them so infrequently (how's that for passive aggression?), but Friday I went to see The Devil Wears Prada 2 at 10AM (more about that in a minute), and as soon as I sat down, I began to have an allergy attack. I figured it would soon pass, but instead it got worse, and I started to cry uncontrollably even though the movie wasn't sad at all. I took (what I hoped was) a Benadryl in the dark, and eventually I felt a little better. I refused to get up and go wash my face in the bathroom, as I didn't want to miss any of the movie, although I could barely see it at times due to all the tears. When I finally did go to the bathroom, I was horrified. My face and eyes were all swollen up like a melon. 

Inky and sunflowers from coworker

Still at the movie plaza, I treated myself to a healthy lunch at Boudin (delicious veggie sandwich), and then walked around for a bit. The area was full of flowers, and I began to feel yucky again, so I went off to the library and the grocery store. When I got home, I took another Benadryl and then texted with the girls. They informed me that the flowers were the problem, and I needed to put them outside STAT, which I did. It was sad not to be able to admire them inside, but I decided that breathing was probably more important. I watched a couple more movies on TV because I didn't feel like reading, took a Zyrtec, and went to bed. I was a little nervous about sleeping because my chest felt heavy after all those allergy meds, but I figured that if I failed to wake up and feed Inky at 6AM, she could munch on my corpse until my housemate returned from her trip.

Reader: I woke up.

On Saturday, I looked and felt relatively "normal" and non-puffy, but I thought it best to take it easy and putter around the house doing chores and stuff, which is what I did, along with starting a thriller for my book club titled He Started It (by Samantha Downing). Enjoyable at first with an unreliable narrator (I like those usually), but annoying in the second half with too many gotchas directed at the reader ~ two stars. I also decided to straighten up the hall closet, and a heavy game board fell on my foot. Ow ow ow! I iced it for a couple hours so it wouldn't swell up. Now, you would think my birthday celebrations had finally come to an end, but you would be wrong. On Sunday, my good friend Lisa treated me to a birthday luncheon at the Tea House on Los Rios in San Juan Capistrano. We had planned to take the train down and back, but we ended up driving because the road closures for the marathon made us late, so we'll do a train trip another time. We enjoyed our lovely tea and goodies, and we browsed around in the cute little shops. I love Old Town SJC! Such a perfect day! Also, some of the gals in my online book club sent me birthday books, and those are appreciated by me as well.

Eight days of birthdaying! It was like Chanukah! I don't get it, but I feel very loved.

At the Tea House on Los Rios, SJC

Spoiler (ish) for The Devil Wears Prada 2! Go away now if you plan to see it and hate spoilers.

Regarding The Devil Wears Prada 2, it was good but not great. I mean, the first one is an iconic treasure, and so DWP2 has big designer shoes to fill, so to speak. The plot is basically a repeat of the DWP1 with Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) reluctantly hiring Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) again at Runway 20 years later and realizing (again) how valuable she is. There are sneaky shenanigans re a corporate takeover, with Miranda outsmarting everyone, as usual. There are some funny moments, such as when Miranda, for the first time, is forced to go to lunch in the Runway cafeteria, which she didn't even know existed. There are also some cringe moments where Miranda says un-PC things to her staff and has to be corrected by her latest "Emily" ~ these verbal gaffes are simply not believable coming from the icy perfection that is Miranda. Emily herself (Emily Blunt) has a larger role in DWP2, and she's good. Nigel (Stanley Tucci) is his same suave, sarcastic self. Andy hasn't really changed, which I guess is the point; she has stayed true to her journalistic principles all these years. 

Nate Cooper (Adrian Grenier), Andy's boyfriend from DWP1, is not in the sequel, sadly. I get that it makes sense they broke up sometime during the past 20 years due to lifestyle and logistic differences, but I missed him regardless. Nate was a great down-to-earth foil against all the fashion superficiality, and we don't have anyone like that in DWP2. Andy does have a love interest in DWP2, a British luxury apartment developer named Peter ~ who stresses that he isn't the money guy, just the contractor, which is supposed to make him seem less gross, I guess. That's fine, except the romance mirrors DWP1 in that Andy treats him less than ideally and grovels to him at the end, similar to her mea culpa lunch with Nate at the end of DWP1. It annoyed me. It wasn't exactly the same, but it was close enough for me to go, argh, why is Andy always apologizing to men? There's nothing wrong with Andy being less about finding love and more about her career, and you don't hear men apologizing for that, ever.

Also, and this isn't the movie's fault, I have a bit of "face blindness," especially when it comes to men. All white men with brown hair and scruffy beards look the same to me. Miranda has a new guy Henry, who is a white man with brown hair and a scruffy beard, just like Peter the contractor, plus Henry has a British accent similar to Peter's. I sometimes found it hard to tell them apart. I will likely watch DWP2 again when it appears on Prime or whatever because I didn't get the full experience due to my allergy attack plus the white guy/ brown hair/ scruffy beard confusion.

That's all.