Birthday!

I had a good birthday. (Especially good when you consider that last year, I worked a double on my birthday. And got fired.) 37 is not an important birthday, but it's my first that made me want to cringe.

Nevertheless, it was well spent. Hubs and I attended a wine class with my coworkers, and we drank a crap-ton of delicious Loire Valley whites. Then we had dinner at Eastern Standard, where we consumed a magnum of bubbly, two excellent bottles of red, a bottle of Lambrusco, and after-dinner drinks. (I also ate many delectable Wellfleet oysters, fried sweetbreads, a charcuterie plate, a bowl of mussels, and a butterscotch bread pudding.) The management showered us with free stuff, since we were all industry, and good times were had by all.

The next day I paid for it, with a fiercesome hangover. Voting was a shitshow--I've never been part of such a shoddily organized, shoddily run voting system. Up yours, Rhode Island. No wonder we're so anxious to get out of here. It took us two hours, but we finally managed to vote. Being both hungover and frustrated as hell from that, we got into a wicked fight later that night, even as we were vastly relieved at the voting outcome.

Then, of course, the very next day, New England got hammered with a nor'easter. I had to drive home through a snowstorm--a snowstorm! In early November!--which left us with three inches of snow and 50-mph wind gusts. My 55-minute commute stretched to an hour and forty minutes; the interstates were mostly clear, but I didn't go above 50 mph, for fear of hitting black ice.

So the high point was my birthday. The rest of the week since then has been kind of a wash. But we're getting closer to being fully packed, and at least my Facebook feed is no longer full of political commentary.