Today is Meredith’s 36th birthday. Happy birthday, love!

Since Saturday is our date day, I asked Meredith to trade days with me so that I could have the planning for yesterday and she could have the planning for next Saturday for my birthday. She agreed, so I put together a nice little day for Meredith, at least as best as I could afford.

It all started with sleeping in. We slept until about 8:00, when we both woke up with a little assistance from the kitties. Since it was Meredith’s birthday celebration day, I decided we would start with a romantic little destination – the nearby DMV. It turns out that our licenses would expire this year, and they would expire on our birthdays, so Mer reminded me of that fact on Friday evening. So, to get that out of the way, we got ready and headed off to the DMV around 9:15 or so. That turned out to be happily efficient, and we were on our way, new licenses in wallets, around 10:00.

We had a little extra time (the restaurant I wanted to take Mer to for brunch did not open until 11:00), so I drove us around random roads in the valley. Everything was very pretty with the snow – we have upwards of a foot in most places, and the woods were beautiful. Mer did not know that I was stalling, and so she also enjoyed trying to figure out where we were going. After 30 minutes or so of sightseeing, I got on the highway and drove us to Mustard Seed Market.

Mustard Seed Market is a natural foods grocery store that also has a cafe. I had thought I had never been, but when we were leaving the place I saw a (former) movie theater and remembered that I had been to the restaurant 15 years ago with Meredith’s dad, and then went to see the movie version of Richard III. Mer also thinks we were there with her family when we went to see Much Ado About Nothing, so I may have been there twice. However, since both times were 15 years ago or more, it was essentially a first visit.

We were still early for the restaurant, and had about 20 minutes to wait, so we used the time to wander the aisles of the grocery store. Many of the offerings looked very fine, but where they appeared to excel was their selections of bread (and maybe coffee – they had a ton of fair trade organic coffees). They must have had a dozen different types of fresh breads, all of which I like very much. I will need to keep that information stashed away for future use.

We finally wandered upstairs to the cafe, but still had a few minutes before they would seat us. We used the very nice bathrooms, and then Meredith read about the cooking classes that were offered while I read about the live music the cafe offers on weekends. Coming up in the next few weeks is a woman singing songs from the 20s and 30s, an Irish group, and some guitar players. I also need to tuck that information away.

We got a seat at a table that overlooked the store itself, and we ordered. I got an excellent breaded chicken with rice and Meredith got a ham and cheese omelet. The store offered three types of drinks that I love – hot chocolate, smoothies, and shakes. I tried the hot chocolate, and, not surprising for a natural foods store, it was pretty poor hot chocolate. Natural hot chocolates are low in sugar and sometimes in cocoa, and while this hot chocolate was not gross, it just tasted like warm milk. The food itself was excellent, and the portions were normal sized so we did not feel bloated as we left. I did swing by the bakery and picked up four chocolate cookies as we left. They were very good.

We drove home, where we proceeded to rest and semi-nap. This caused us to miss part of Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!, but it dawned on me that I could stream the show from the laptop that Shannon gave me a year ago. Duh. I have a headphone jack that plugs into my stereo system that I bought for my iPod, but it works with the laptop as well. So, we happily got cozy under a blanket on the couch and laughed through the show, which included a dumb criminal story from Stow, Ohio. The man wore his burglary mask in the bank and then waited in line with the mask on. The police were called and caught him. Stow is only about a mile from our house. We made national news! Umm, yeah.

After Wait Wait, we played nerdy book games, and I gave Mer her present. I ordered her the Teaching Company’s 48-lecture course on British literature. We already have the lectures on American lit, so this was a happy find in the last catalog I recieved just before Mer’s birthday. After she opened her gift, we played the game that Mer got for Christmas in which you have to guess the book or author based on the first line of a book. Mer beat me 8-3 (ouch!) and 8-5. We then played a book game from Amazon that Mer got a few years ago in which you guess the book or author based on clues. I was winning the game with only one more book to go when I hit a space where you had to give up a book. Mer ended up winning 7-5. Sigh. So much for beating her on her birthday!

That took us to almost 5:00, when I had invited a bunch of people over to go up to the Cheesecake Factory to celebrate. Sadly, Ombudsman and his wife Karen could not make it, but Zach and Londa, Nate and Rachel, and Nate and Ami all were able to come. Weirdly, it had been Rachel’s birthday on Thursday and it was Ami’s birthday yesterday, and with my birthday next Saturday, we were celebrating four birthdays out of eight people.

We split into two cars for the drive up, with Nate and Rachel going with Zach and Londa, and Mer and I went with Dubbs (Ami) and Nate. We had a good time during the 30-minute drive, talking about school (of course) and other things. When we got there, Zach had already put our group in for a table, and while most folks were looking at an hour wait, we were told our table would be ready in 15-30 minutes. While that number turned out to be closer to 35 minutes, it looks as if big groups get a jump on the queue. As a happy bonus, we were seated at a round booth in a corner, so we were actually able to talk and hear with no problems.

We had a good time. The food was tasty, and we laughed a lot – so much so that the people in the booth next to us wanted to know what we were drinking so they could get some too (we were drinking soft drinks!) and they wished us a happy birthday. Our server had candles in the whipped cream of the cakes and cheesecakes of the birthday folks, and we had about eight servers singing “Happy Birthday” in a magnificently terrible way. It was much fun, especially where we had heard them singing “Happy Birthday” to another table and Ami absolutely did not want to be sung to. Anytime you can slightly embarrass Dubbs is a good time. Sadly, I forgot my camera and so have no photos of the evening.

So, dinner and dessert took about two hours, and then we dispersed into the evening to find a fairly heavy snow-belt snow. Ami’s car has moderately bald tires, so that made for a few exciting turns on the way to the highway, but we soon drove out of the snow belt and got home just fine.

Since Dubbs gave me her old iPod Touch a few months back, I loaded the entire works of Shakespeare on the device, and I started reading a sonnet to Mer each night as we went to bed. After weeks of doing this, on the eve of her 36th birthday, I got to read to her Sonnet 60, which is this (this made both of us laugh):