This is me turning thirty.

[rsadelle]

So far thirty doesn't feel all that different, although I do like the number thirty better than the number twenty-nine.

The biggest thing I'm doing to celebrate this year is taking charge of my birthday. I had one really good birthday a few years ago when allegram and dedalvs were up visiting, but my birthdays have been not the best for years and years. Not for any real tragedy of a reason; they've just been minorly annoying. I've said for a while that if I could get away with it, I would do away with my birthday celebration all together. See, I don't really want to spend the evening of my birthday spending a lot of time with a lot of people, especially when I've had the repeated experience that people don't want to do what I want to do. A quiet night at home where I can read, write, or watch a movie is my idea of a good time. (I'm not wholly antisocial, just a bit of an introvert.) Last year or the year before I tried doing lunch instead of dinner, but that didn't work out particularly well: one set of cousins was hungover and couldn't make it, and my brother goes to San Francisco to party for New Year's Eve and wasn't back yet. So this year we're doing dinner tomorrow night instead. (Although the cousins who are usually hungover are recovering from the flu and not yet ready to get off the couch and won't be there anyway. My mom says my brother initially said he would be there, but he also said that of her birthday which he then couldn't make, so we'll see.) That means I'm enjoying a quiet day at home today.

Specific things I've done/plan to do today:

Following on lakeeffectgirl's New Year's Eve plans, I watched The Bourne Supremacy earlier, and I think I'm going to watch The Bourne Ultimatum later. Jason/Nicky forever! I also bought the newest Michelle Sagara book last week, so I might go read for a while.

While watching the movie, I also wrote thank-you notes and organized some of the stuff that's been lying around on my dining room table for months. That might not seem like a fun birthday activity, but I like organizing and I like the idea of starting out a new year with at least some of that taken care of.

My mom's asked me if I had anything new to go on my wish list about ten times since I got a job. I keep telling her no. (As of about one-thirty yesterday, she said I was so far getting a cake. We'll see if she did something creative or just went for things off the list.) The reality is that my life is pretty pared down to essentials, and eating really good food actually is a treat for me, and something I'd rather have than anything else I could think of as vague wants. (The snack foods I put on my wish list are things I'm slightly less likely to buy for myself because they're either expensive [nuts] or impossible to find [Sunkist Fruit Gems], and gift certificates make me feel like I can splurge a tiny bit.) So now I'm going to talk about food.

I decided I wanted pizza for dinner on my birthday and that I could spend the money on the ingredients for it since I got gift certificates for Hanukkah and Christmas, and then I discovered that S&S no longer carries the vegan, gluten-free pizza crust I was buying. They do carry another kind, so I'll be trying that out for dinner with Passionate Mango coconut milk yogurt (something else I love but is hideously expensive) for dessert. Yum! Tomorrow night is Thai food with raw "cheese"cake for dessert.

I wasn't going to cook for lunch, but then the thing I really wanted was something that had to be cooked: rice, black beans, and sauteed bell pepper and onion. For the black beans, I've been heating them in a pan with a little bit of water, some garlic (I stopped cutting up my own and started just buying jars of chopped garlic), salt, and whatever spices seem good to me at the moment (today it was a little bit of cayenne; I think I liked it with red pepper flakes and a dash of sage better). For the bell pepper and onion, I just sauteed them on medium or so with some salt, pepper, and garlic. I also had some chips, some of which I ate with the main lunch stuff and some of which I ate with what I've been laughingly calling lazy salsa (cut up tomato). I managed to burn the rice on my first try. This is the third or fourth thing I've burned in that particular pan, so maybe I've just ruined it.

The bottom line of all of this is that I'm so far having a very nice, quiet birthday. Thank you to everyone who's been a part of it! I've gotten all kinds of lovely emails, tweets, Facebook comments, and even a v-gift. Some wonderful, anonymous person also gifted me with six months of paid time, which I'm excited about. I was thinking about letting my paid account lapse, but now I don't have to. Thank you so much, wonderful, anonymous person!