Fantastic Birthday

I took off of work Friday because basically everything awesome was happening that day already. We decided to turn it into an impromptu birthday bash.

So Sal and I started the morning with a kickass, giant breakfast: bacon, eggs, hashbrowns, and toast. BAM! Breakfast in my stomach.

As soon as my belly was properly full, we headed out to see "The Dark Knight Rises."

So I screwed up. This is really the only dumb part of the day. Thought I bought tickets online to see the movie at a theater downtown, but as we arrived and saw there were no show times for when I bought tickets, we quickly realized I bought tickets for the wrong theater. So we paid $4 to park in the lot at the wrong theater. Had to jump in the car and rush a few miles to the Central West End to see it.

My anger at having to pay $4 for no reason quickly melted away as I sat in the theater chair while an organist played the Adam West Batman theme.

The movie was awesome. Go see it. It's long, so make sure you go to a comfy theater. All I'm going to say is that its better than Batman Begins, not as good as The Dark Knight, tons of nods to the comics and previous movies.

So after the film was over, we drove back downtown near where the theater I thought I bought tickets for was, and went to the Schlafly tap room.

For the next four hours, we just hung out. I wanted to keep things informal, because I've found in recent years, when you try to plan things out, everything falls apart. People came and went, people bought me beers, we ate pretzels and beer cheese, and had a ton of laughs.

When I had a proper birthday buzz going, we walked down to Soldier's Memorial to see a free Offspring concert. They rocked the hell out. Played a nice set of old and new and sounded as solid as their albums.

I was screaming every song at the top of my lungs and dancing around. Then I looked to the left and saw the most awesome toddler in the history of the world. Perched on his dad's shoulders and air drumming his heart out, we locked eyes, and both reached for the greatest high five at the same time. The moment was capture in the picture above and that more or less sums up the entire day.