![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shiredancerOMG, I have had the *best* birthday!
We drove down to Palm Springs, some three and a half hours southeast of us, to visit my brother and his partner in their new home. Kidlet elected to spend the weekend with a friend, so we were on our own *g*. We arrived just at midnight as it rolled over from Friday January 18 to Saturday January 19, and so my birthday officially began. They welcomed us with a couple bottles of wine and a plate of cheese served up by a cozy fire, and we curled up and chatted until 2 a.m., just catching up. Their house is *humongous*, as is everything else in Palm Springs, especially the golf courses and country clubs and Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan, et al, spreads -- but my guys have managed to keep a really nice sense of coziness and warmth in their place. It was the end of a horrible, tense week of hammering out the application files and databases to get ready for the big deadline next week, so the wine was especially welcome and instantly mellowing.
Then we got up the next morning to take the aerial tramway to the top of San Jacinto peak, that place where you see a snow-topped mountain overlooking the barren desert floor (except for the ostentatious oases of greenery and rampant water use, see above). Great fun to see the valley floor dropping away from a rotating car, then to step out into crisp, sparkling snow. We wandered down the path and into the deep, unbroken snow, crunching and slipping and floundering and having a ball. The sun was brilliant and the sky was bright blue, so after a while it even got a bit hot up there. I found a (sort of quiet) corner to read my birthday poem, so tradition was suitably upheld. Then we whooshed back down for lunch in Palm Springs (tapas with a really yummy German wheat beer) and a drive through the valley. Those were the longest, widest streets I've ever seen: Bob Hope Drive, Frank Sinatra Way, Bing Crosby's restaurant, Golf Classic this and that (it was the weekend of the famous Bob Hope Classic and restaurant reservations were simply not to be had). Everything is just on this mindbogglingly huge scale. Me, I like small and cozy so I felt really out of place. It was fun to visit, but the overt displays of wealth and oversized "grandeour" were kind of numbing.
Next was a wine-and-appetizer tasting at the little store where the guys have a wine-of-the-month membership -- my favorite was a sweet cabernet port dessert wine. We still have lots of bottles at home from our anniversary wine-tasting trip (among others), so we weren't buying -- but ouch, hard to pass up! Then dinner at a nice Mexican restaurant and home for another cozy fire and the most sinfully delicious chocolate birthday cake I've ever had *dreamy reminiscences*. I was able to make a quick check-in on LJ before bed and I had so many lovely birthday greetings waiting for me -- thank you *so* much, all of you darling people! I'm especially grateful and humbled because I am just the worst person for remembering birthdays. Another goal: to get better at sending warm greetings to everybody on their special day!
Today my brother and I got up at 6:45 to get over to the Living Desert animal park and the trailhead for a three-hour, five-mile hike. It started out crisp and cold but we warmed up quickly, especially during the long part where we scrambled over rocks and boulders up the dry gully wash. It was an excellent hike through varied desert landscape and canyons and the bajado (I think that's the name the local Native Americans give the alluvial fans). Wildlife encountered included quail and rabbits, some desert gray squirrels, and a big ol' jack rabbit. We then met up with our respective partners who had lazed the morning away in more civilized pursuits of eggs and coffee, and toured the Living Desert exhibits to see some wonderful animals, both local and exotic: they have a *great* giraffe and ostrich enclosure with some of the biggest ostriches I've ever seen (feather dusters on the hoof, heh). The cheetahs were out an moving, unusual for mid-day, and the Mexican wolves were running around. Didn't see the mountain lion or the sand cat, but did see the ears of a sleepy serval and several varieties of foxes, some peccaries and warthogs, lots of gazelles, and even the bighorn sheep up on the hillside.
This was followed by a lazy lunch poolside back at my brother's house, more wine, and some more cake eaten in the hot tub where we soaked our poor, sore muscles. Absolutely perfect bliss, and all the stress of the long work week faded away to nothing by the time we left. It was exactly like a luxury spa visit -- couldn't have asked for a better time! *Hearts my brothers like mad*
A lovely welcoming of my fifty-fourth year to heaven, and auspicious as a beginning. A good year coming up, methinks?
We drove down to Palm Springs, some three and a half hours southeast of us, to visit my brother and his partner in their new home. Kidlet elected to spend the weekend with a friend, so we were on our own *g*. We arrived just at midnight as it rolled over from Friday January 18 to Saturday January 19, and so my birthday officially began. They welcomed us with a couple bottles of wine and a plate of cheese served up by a cozy fire, and we curled up and chatted until 2 a.m., just catching up. Their house is *humongous*, as is everything else in Palm Springs, especially the golf courses and country clubs and Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan, et al, spreads -- but my guys have managed to keep a really nice sense of coziness and warmth in their place. It was the end of a horrible, tense week of hammering out the application files and databases to get ready for the big deadline next week, so the wine was especially welcome and instantly mellowing.
Then we got up the next morning to take the aerial tramway to the top of San Jacinto peak, that place where you see a snow-topped mountain overlooking the barren desert floor (except for the ostentatious oases of greenery and rampant water use, see above). Great fun to see the valley floor dropping away from a rotating car, then to step out into crisp, sparkling snow. We wandered down the path and into the deep, unbroken snow, crunching and slipping and floundering and having a ball. The sun was brilliant and the sky was bright blue, so after a while it even got a bit hot up there. I found a (sort of quiet) corner to read my birthday poem, so tradition was suitably upheld. Then we whooshed back down for lunch in Palm Springs (tapas with a really yummy German wheat beer) and a drive through the valley. Those were the longest, widest streets I've ever seen: Bob Hope Drive, Frank Sinatra Way, Bing Crosby's restaurant, Golf Classic this and that (it was the weekend of the famous Bob Hope Classic and restaurant reservations were simply not to be had). Everything is just on this mindbogglingly huge scale. Me, I like small and cozy so I felt really out of place. It was fun to visit, but the overt displays of wealth and oversized "grandeour" were kind of numbing.
Next was a wine-and-appetizer tasting at the little store where the guys have a wine-of-the-month membership -- my favorite was a sweet cabernet port dessert wine. We still have lots of bottles at home from our anniversary wine-tasting trip (among others), so we weren't buying -- but ouch, hard to pass up! Then dinner at a nice Mexican restaurant and home for another cozy fire and the most sinfully delicious chocolate birthday cake I've ever had *dreamy reminiscences*. I was able to make a quick check-in on LJ before bed and I had so many lovely birthday greetings waiting for me -- thank you *so* much, all of you darling people! I'm especially grateful and humbled because I am just the worst person for remembering birthdays. Another goal: to get better at sending warm greetings to everybody on their special day!
Today my brother and I got up at 6:45 to get over to the Living Desert animal park and the trailhead for a three-hour, five-mile hike. It started out crisp and cold but we warmed up quickly, especially during the long part where we scrambled over rocks and boulders up the dry gully wash. It was an excellent hike through varied desert landscape and canyons and the bajado (I think that's the name the local Native Americans give the alluvial fans). Wildlife encountered included quail and rabbits, some desert gray squirrels, and a big ol' jack rabbit. We then met up with our respective partners who had lazed the morning away in more civilized pursuits of eggs and coffee, and toured the Living Desert exhibits to see some wonderful animals, both local and exotic: they have a *great* giraffe and ostrich enclosure with some of the biggest ostriches I've ever seen (feather dusters on the hoof, heh). The cheetahs were out an moving, unusual for mid-day, and the Mexican wolves were running around. Didn't see the mountain lion or the sand cat, but did see the ears of a sleepy serval and several varieties of foxes, some peccaries and warthogs, lots of gazelles, and even the bighorn sheep up on the hillside.
This was followed by a lazy lunch poolside back at my brother's house, more wine, and some more cake eaten in the hot tub where we soaked our poor, sore muscles. Absolutely perfect bliss, and all the stress of the long work week faded away to nothing by the time we left. It was exactly like a luxury spa visit -- couldn't have asked for a better time! *Hearts my brothers like mad*
A lovely welcoming of my fifty-fourth year to heaven, and auspicious as a beginning. A good year coming up, methinks?
