corrielle | It seems the world has survived three decades of me...

Last Thursday, I turned thirty. The actual day was celebrated with very little fanfare. I got up, prepped for class, introduced my lit students to Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour" and Adrienne Su's "The English Canon," led a spirited and curious discussion about feminist and gender literary criticism, and came home. Rae took me out to dinner at the Macaroni Grill when she got home, and I had fantastic grilled lamb and vegetables, and between us we polished off three fourths of a bottle of wine and had to hang around Borders for a long while after dinner. It was low key but lovely. I have a fantastic girlfriend.

Then, on Saturday, we made the house look nice and had a tea party, complete with a pretty new tea pot with matching two-tiered finger-food tray. Actually, we ended up pressed every teacup in the house into service so that we could make a variety of different teas. (Black, chai, herbal, and green were the options.) Rae, who was in charge of the cooking, made finger sandwiches, strawberries and cream, coffee cake, and delicious vegan chocolate cupcakes that I thought were out of this world. Quite a few people got to come, and we mostly sat around, chatted, and played games. lynxgriffin got to be the one to alert me to her birthday present, which is a picture of Temeraire and Lawrence posted here. When we got hungry later in the evening, a lot of us piled into cars and went to In N Out. It was an amusing contrast to the dainty food we'd had at tea time.

So, I had an nice, relaxed party and got to spend time with people I care about, which is really all that I wanted out of my 30th.