Best Birthday Ever

Well on March 28, 2017 I turned 61, The day started off fantastically. We were up early and off to breakfast at a place called the Breakfast Republic in the San Diego Gaslamp district. Our daughter was giving it a big thumbs up and we decided to meet there for breakfast.

The night before our daughter, knowing her parents, tells us to call her if we are going to be late for our 8:00 am breakfast. She was guessing that we would call her and tell her , like usual, that we were going to be late and wouldn't get that until 8:15 am at the earliest. Well I am proud to say we walked into the restaurant at precisely 8:00 am and looked for our daughter, only to discover that we had beaten her to the restaurant. Boy we were feeling pretty good about that!

So we had ourselves seated, started on our first cup of coffee and waited for Nikki to show. Well at 8:15 we get a text asking us "what's up" where upon she had been waiting for our phone call to telling her we were on our way to the restaurant. But since we were actually on time we didn't send one and she was stuck at her house waiting on us. Well we cleared that up and finally met. It turns out that the Breakfast Republic has a pretty 'interesting' menu and I ended up ordering a dish called Vietnamese style sweet & spicy Chicken Wings. Which is basically 5 buffalo chicken wings in a bowl of rice with eggs on top (mmm-mmm-no) didn't taste bad just didn't taste like breakfast. But at least the company was awesome, all in all a great start to my birthday.

From there we went back to the hotel, finished packing, loaded up the car and took off towards San Clemente to meet with our accountant. After all it is tax time. So as we are cruising down the I-5 freeway, listening to Sirius/XM – Traffic in my lane comes to a sudden stop, so that I had to slam on the breaks and swerve, just a bit, to miss the car in front of me. I look in my rearview mirror and see the car behind me is just going to barely stop in time or so I think with disaster avert-CRASH!!! 

It turns out the car 2 cars back made the poor decision to use the car behind me as it's front brakes. This unfortunately pushed the car behind me into my Mustangs bumper and me into the next lane!!! Needless to say, I punched the gas and managed to work my way  over off the freeway without being hit. Unfortunately that put me about 100 yards down the freeway and on the wrong side of traffic. So after calling 911 and AAA we had to wait around for an hour for the Highway Patrol officer to finish getting the other cars off the freeway before he could talk to us. And this took all of 10 minutes.

Obviously we were late to our appointment. But we took care of it and then headed for home through the heart of L.A. during the start of Rush hour. So needless to say it was a rather tedious drive.

But it was still my Birthday, which meant I picked where we had dinner!! So it's 7:00 pm and I figure lets get steak and suggest we go to Jocko's, one of the top steak places on the central coast. So Helen calls and we find out that it would be a 90 minute wait. Which is not happening after spending all that time on the road I just want to eat and go home. So maybe next time.

Next stop F. Mclintock's in Pismo Beach, not a great steak house, but good. So Helen call's and again it's a 90 minute wait. So again no thanks. SO I give up and say lets pick up Chinese from our favorite place and just take it home. Helen agrees as this lets us stop at Costco on the way home.

So Helen goes on line and discovers, there closed on Tuesday night, So I finally give up and we just order pizza from Woodstock Pizza. The fellow on the phone tells us the pizza will be delivered around 8:30! Which I should have guessed.

So now we go into Costco and pick up my birthday present from the pharmacy. As she places the 4 Liter jug on the counter, I remember I have a colonoscopy appointment on Thursday which means no food but lots of 'cleaning' on Wednesday.

So we pick up our goodies and head to the car, I look at my watch and it's 7:58 pm and I check with Helen on the pizza.

"The pizza isn't due to come until 8:30 right?

"Yes, that's right" she says.

So we get in the car and head home. We are about 5 minutes from the house when Helen gets a notice from our alarm system that someone is at the front door.. It's now 8:03 and lo and behold she sees the Pizza delivery guy standing at the door with our pizza!! After a lot of confusion and talking through the doorbell camera, he waits for us at the house and we get our food..

We take it into the house, unpack, and realize that we still need to get 6,000 steps to meet our daily step goal of 10,000 steps. So off we go to finish our stepping and finally an hour later we get to sit down and enjoy our now cold pizza.

So as I finally get ready for bed, I think to myself that this was the best birthday ever, and thank god it was finally over and that the jug of magic elixir would start the next set of festivities the next day.