Birthdays and other stuff

So I had a birthday over the weekend. I am now another mumble older than my previous mumbledy-something age.

It was a very nice day. A lazy one. We went to the beach early. The water was still quite cool–actually cool, rather than the bathtub warm water you get later in the day. I think this is why I am so spoiled when it comes to swimming. I spent so much time in the Gulf with its oh-so-warm water, that I think that’s the temperature swimming pools (or lakes, or whatever) ought to be. Anyway, besides being on the cool side, the water was practically like glass. The surf’s rarely more than a foot or so high, but it will usually start a good fifty yards out from the beach. Not that morning. Ten feet. Maybe twenty. And beyond that, glassy, gently rolling waves. Just the way I love it.

I’m not much of a surf girl. I really don’t enjoy being blasted by the whitecaps. I like to go out beyond the breakers where the waves just roll in and float up and down. I don’t know that there are many beaches–except on the Gulf coast–where you can get out past the surf and still touch bottom. People complain about the puny surf in the Gulf, but that’s exactly what I love about it.

We didn’t stay long. Maybe an hour. The seaweed has stopped floating in. I’m told that when the seaweed stops, the jellyfish start coming in. It’s going to be hot for another month or so…I hope we don’t get too terribly many jellyfish. They’re not much fun. I’ll have to stock up on meat tenderizer. It’s supposed to help with the stings.

After puttering around online while the fella went to get a haircut, we spent most of the afternoon watching a bunch of episodes from the second season of ROME (my birthday present I got myself, donchaknow…). And then we went out to dinner.

In the past, I have made a joint birthday cheesecake or lemon meringue pie for me and the fella, since he’s so much older than I am. (Eight whole days.) Usually, though, there’s at least one other person around to help us eat it. Since even the boy was away from home, I didn’t bake. So, we decided to have dessert with dinner.

I didn’t realize that the two places I had chosen as an either/or for my birthday dinner were literally around the corner from each other. The first place was all booked up (that’s what I get for having my birthday on a Saturday), so we walked over to the other place, the Saltwater Grill, which just happened to be right in front of where we’d parked the car. They had lots of room, fast, perfect service, fabulous food and we split an order of butterscotch bananas for our birthday cake.

Oh, my, LORD, those bananas were good. It was just a whole, sliced-lengthwise banana (cut in half, so we each got half a banana) drenched in just-made, so-good-it-must-be-a-sin butterscotch sauce. There was ice cream, and some whipped cream, and some strawberries and blueberries on the plate, and they were all the yummier for the butterscotch sauce. We practically licked the plate clean. I’d have licked it, for real, if we hadn’t been out in public.

The corn-and-crab chowder was yummy, the seafood pasta had so many shrimp and crawfish tails in it, I couldn’t eat them all even when I quit eating the pasta to concentrate on the goodies, the fella’s fish just quit swimming that morning…but as good as that was, man, those butterscotch bananas… Who needs cake???

So. Now that my self-indulgence is out of the way, who’s got books? If somebody gets a copy of The Eternal Rose from a bookstore, any bookstore that isn’t direct from Wildside/Juno, will you let me know? Thanks.

And I’m working away on Thunder still. I got three pages written today. Wrote several pages of synopsis yesterday. And I got hit by a brainstorm for this story… don’t know yet if I’m actually going to do it, but it would increase the conflict by a buttload, so I just might. I’ll think about it some more.

I also finally repotted the tropical plants I bought–a salmon/yellow hibiscus, a white jasmine, two “blueberry ice” bougainvilleas (I already have a “raspberry ice” one), a rex begonia that seems to love the humidity outside, and a variegated African violet I moved from the panhandle that I’d never got round to re-potting. I ran out of soil in the middle of the job, and had to run back to WalMart to get some more. It’s so nice to be able to do that. (Though I could have run down to Smith’s Feed and Seed back in the panhandle, if I’d done it there.)