Birthdayses

I finished reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and it was okay. A little bit after work I met Mary Beth up at the Park for a little walking around the pond before we went to our birthdays dinner. Today is hers and tomorrow is mine and we have stuff going on, so we had a nice fancy-ish dinner just for us two at Tsunami, a place we've casually said we should go to for years and years and finally just went to for the first time. It was nice. My favorite was the bacon-wrapped dates I had for the appetizer. Then after that we walked around a little bit and were just going to go to House of Mews but saw that Burke's was still open so we stopped by. I picked up a few used books: Sights Unseen by Kaye Gibbons, The Talking Room by Marianne Hauser, Judge on Trial by Ivan Klíma, Remainder by Tom McCarthy, Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf, and Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead. Then we did make it across the street to House of Mews and looked in the window. And this one whitish-orangish cat that was up on top of stuff looked at us as we were looking at it and it jumped down (half-disturbing the sleeping cat it jumped down next to but promptly went back to sleep) and came up to the door to try to see us. It was all opening the mail slot with its face. Then it went up to the window to be closer, all rubbing its body and putting its paw up to the window. So sweet! Then we went home and did birthday exchange thingies. She got me a bunch of chocolate from Philip Ashley, an award-winning chocolatier here in town who she saw now says does fair trade. Also some books: Mentored by a Madman by A.J. Lees (subtitled "The William Burroughs Experiment", written by this scientist who discovered a treatment for Parkinson's and was all inspired by Burroughs), Essays on the Self by Virginia Woolf, Theorem by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Boys Alive by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Nice! We've started out with a nice Mary Beth birthday and now I have more stuff to do!