Serious, Serious Profession

Friday morning started off with chocolate crumb cake and orange juice, and ended with a nap. Yes, it was my birthday or the middle age equivalent of going out with a whimper. *Cough*

Yes, if it wasn't here before, middle-age is certainly here now. It's no longer lingering...it's fully out of the shadows and it's staring at me in the sunlight. Middle-age is tainting everything I do like an ancient unwrapped onion in refrigerator.

The day started out nice enough. The Missus had balloons delivered to the house and one of them even gives you a birthday greeting if you squeeze it. It is scary where they can put voice chips nowadays and it's only a matter of time before the jerk at work that nobody can stand, finally figures out a way to talk out of his...never mind.

Chocolate crumb cake and orange juice were the first course, followed by various collectible cars from Procrastinator Jr, then the Missus gave me "Chef, The Complete Series" on DVD http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108723/ because, don't you wish your woman rocked it like that?

This is impressive because no other woman has managed put up with me for more than a year and if they did, they would probably give me a pallet of coal, instead.

So I was going to start on the novelization of my second screenplay, but I f*cked around. Watched "Chef's" first two episodes of Season One and I tried to make up for the sleep I didn't get the night before. Wishful thinking on my part as NASCAR has unofficially opened a race track on my street and everyone was either speeding or honking at everyone else for not speeding.

A dozen aborted attempts at sleep later and I finally fell asleep. Only, I couldn't snap out of my nap, so I go under for another twenty-eight minutes and wind up late for everything. Late putting in the dress shirts in the laundry for Procrastinator Junior and myself, late shaving the beard that grows everywhere except below my lips, and late picking Procrastinator Jr. from spring camp.

The Kid and I had to be at Izzy's at 6:45 http://www.izzyssteaksandchops.com/izzy.html to meet the Missus for dinner and when you really have to be some place, that's when everybody in front of you spaces out at the traffic light. That, or they're waiting for it to change to another shade of green. This tends to add up timewise, after seven space cadets spend twenty or thirty seconds apiece vegetating at the signal.

Not to mention that they can only find the pedal on the right when the light at the next intersection turns yellow, but you wind up getting left behind like that weird anti-non-Christian book series.

So I calls up the Missus and ask her to ask them to move the reservations up to 7PM, then I do my best Nicholas Cage in "The Rock" by soaring over the hills at 60 MPH and doing handbrake turns. No geographically challenged cable cars managed to blow up http://isthatsowrong.blogspot.com/2006/03/tread-lightly-film-industry-when.html but I did send a couple of yuppies jumping over their cars for cover, here and there.

We managed to make it there at 7:02 and we got a booth upstairs. Dinner was excellent as usual and the service was impeccable as always, despite the misguided ravings of this lunatic http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/10/07/DDGRNF326K1.DTL

I've been there over a dozen times over the past sixteen years, in a suit at times and casual attire at others, yet I've always experienced some of the best service that any restaurant has to offer. The courses have always been properly spaced and we've never been kept waiting once we were seated.

I've never understood the allure that some people have in going to a restaurant where the employees treat you like something that they've stepped in on their way to work nor have I ever understood why people want to be celebrities, so that they can receive lavish attention when they dine. If you ever hear me recommend a restaurant, you can be assured that every time I've eaten there, the service is at least two steps above decent. I wouldn't stand for less and I could not understand why you wouldn't either.

Right before dessert (and the least favorite part of my birthday with that accursed song), I related to Procrastinator Jr. that when he celebrates the very same birthday I had just endured, I will be seventy. That got me nice and depressed, I don't even want to blog about it the day after. We got home and I laid down for a nap that somehow extended into three in the morning. That's me, Mr. Romance.

How prophetic Mick and even you didn't see it coming when you put it down on vinyl, "what a drag it is, getting old."