I Turned 30
I’ve been taught to avoid excuses, first by my parents and then later in the wisdom of those I read. It was the latter that taught me an excuse for many things should never be offered when this a better explanation: “I didn’t care enough to produce the outcome you were looking for.” This is especially true when one is late. For years, if I was late, I would compose the reason in my head, what the extenuating circumstances were, why this was unusual, how I would correct it in the future. Then, with embarrassment, I realized these thoughtfully-composed reasons skirted reality: they were simply another way to say I hadn’t cared enough to be on time. So, while I have many interesting reasons (excuses) why I haven’t written here lately, it is quite simply because I haven’t cared enough to do it. But, I can’t let my birthday weekend come and go without listing the details of it. And also, I should write here more frequently.
Summers, we get out of the office early on Fridays, and this past May 22nd was both my 30th birthday and the first time for the season we would get out at 3pm. This was the weather:
Perfect, right? So I came home to this smörgåsboard of Mykala’s making: delicious sandwiches, noodle salad, desserts both procured and made, and Essie ready to come on an adventure. Before we left, I opened my first present: Mykala got me a t-shirt from my favorite show, the Accidental Tech Podcast. It fit perfectly, and it is exactly the one I would’ve purchased. So we packed it all up, blanket, food, baby, ourselves, and drove over to Minnehaha Falls park. We sat on the blanket in the PERFECT weather, watched Essie play, ate our food, listened to the live music, and people-watched as families and students, retirees and strivers passed by and began to queue up around the Sea Salt Eatery building, getting beer from the Surly Truck and kicking around in the early evening. I opened simply lovely cards from Mykala and from Ess, ones I will most certainly keep in my card file.
Here I am unwrapping one of Mykala’s AMAZING sandwich creations:
And here we are, the three of us:
You don’t get a lot of perfect moments. I tend to spoil a lot of my potential ones: mine are predicated on the ultra-rare combination of the at-peace internal (my mind feeling at rest, aka nothing at all has gone poorly recently and I’m not worrying about something) and of the well-coordinated external (a fun activity, wonderful company, great weather). This was a perfect HOUR. How lucky I am. Yet, that was only the beginning of my birthday!
So Mykala goes, we should meet my parents they have your OTHER gift. And I’m thinking other gift? I never even managed to request one thing for my birthday, so a second gift in the offering is pretty shocking. We pull up to the Rosedale Mall parking lot and find Mykala’s parents, and it turns out they went in on a ScanSnap ix500 with Mykala and I’ll be gosh-darned if my head didn’t just about explode! Such a huge surprise! I only suspected when I saw Robin carrying the box towards our car. We have since did the math and it has been just about four years that I’ve been talking about this thing. It is a document scanner that is optimized to do one thing really well: take your documents that you’ve been storing in hanging files, take your receipts, your business cards, your miscellaneous user manuals labelled “save”, your mortgage settlement documents, your magazine clippings and turn them into searchable digital data. Fast. Really really REALLY FAST. If you count both sides, 50 pages per minute. I’ve scanned 1200 pages so far and am just getting started. Our next house move will feature absolutely no hernia-inducing boxes of papers.
A fine fine way to turn 30. I am so happy.