"The part with the dragon is really cool."

Sometime in the mid 1980s, my aunt gave me a novelty record for my birthday. The record was a little thing made of thin, floppy plastic, and it contained a rather silly personalized song:

Hey [Rouge], it's your birthday.
My name is Zoom and I live on the moon

I don't remember the rest of it, but for whatever reason those two lines have etched themselves permanently into the mind of my parents -- they still serenade me with it each birthday. Little did I know that Captain Zoom is still around (casette, CD, mp3) and wishing kids happy birthday. Must be nostalgia. My parents did afterall send me a Care Bears birthday card.

Anyway, a while back (October) Beth asked us to write about our births and I replied that I didn't have a lot of details to recount. However my father filled in some of the blanks last night.

"Twenty seven years ago tonight, your mother was eating butter brickle ice cream and hemming some suit pants we had bought. She kept complaining that her back was hurting. At ll:30 she woke me up and said we'd better go to the hospital."

And thus I began.

So too begins the Birthday Bonanza -- work tequila today, dinner at home tonight, job performance review tomorrow,* post-work drinks and burlesque tomorrow, and Harry Potter 4 on Sunday.

* The job performance review will be an unpleasant break in the bonanza-ing.