I feel a peaceful weekend coming on. I think I’ll be able to bottle my beer on Sunday. Tomorrow we have plans to go to the beach. Gavin is enjoying playing with his castle and pirate ship. Holly is working on her quilts. Leif is sleeping. All seems well. Tonight, new episodes of Monk and Psych come on. I think I’ll sit and watch them with a beer in hand. I just feel nice and relaxed.

So to celebrate my 30th birthday, I spent 1/4 of the day at Gordon Biersch eating burgers and drinking beer. Then I spent 1/4 of the day (and a few hours of the following day) at the Karaoke Hut in Honolulu singing and hanging out with good friends (along with a bottle of good sake and some strange drink mixed up by my buddy N). The result? Holly finds me passed out in my underwear the following morning and kindly documents the occasion for posterity.

I’ve been recently having computer troubles. It’s been happening more and more frequently. This time my desktop and laptop both failed at the same time. The laptops hard drive decided it wasn’t going to function anymore while my desktop decided it didn’t want to start anymore. The laptop was easy enough to fix. I just had to erase everything, re-format the hd and re-install os X. Yay! It works! The desktop not so much. I fiddled and faddled with it and it just won’t do what I say. Sigh. So I decided that it’s time to upgrade. I’m headed to Oahu this weekend to pick up a new computer. I thought about it for a while and was feeling like I couldn’t justify it, but after days of my computer not starting up, I’ve set my mind to it and it’s decided, and since it’s decided, I don’t feel bad anymore. Now I’m just excited. After 5 years, I finally get a new computer. Sweet!

Hurricane Felicia has finally come. Of course it’s not a hurricane anymore. But it sure is raining out. I filled a 2 quart container full of water with the leak in our roof. Crystal light any one?

Leif turned one last week. I can’t believe it, one already. He so big now. Big enough to throw cars and balls off of our lanai. Sigh. BRB.

Anyway, he’s super cute. We took thousands of pictures of him too. His first year is very well documented. I think his first word might be either dad, pico or testicles. That’s my boy.

See the rest of the photos

My 30th birthday has come and gone. I didn’t have a big party or anything like that. Holly was home sick from work (for real) but still managed to make me delicious banana bread for breakfast. Gavin wished me a happy birthday many times. I received many face book messages from friends afar, which was nice. Mostly the day just went by. Gavin of course was dying to give me the two presents that he and granny got for me. Sometime in the afternoon, probably close to two o’clock, Gavin and I decided that we needed to make a cake so that he could properly give me my present. Holly was planning on making me my cake, but she was sick on the couch and I was in a baking kind of mood. Not having any form of chocolate in the house, and an abundance of rum and lilikoi, I decided I was going to have a lilikoi rum cake. I got hold of an abundance of fresh lilikoi juice from my landlord, who picked and juiced about 200 lilikoi that morning. Mmmmm. So good. The cake baked in the oven while I worked and played and lounged around. Holly made a nice simple dinner for us. Something we could eat easily and quickly and get to the important stuff. So the time for cake came. It turned out so delicious. So yum. A great balance of rum and lilikoi and cake in every moist bite. When it came time for presents, which was even before all the cake was consumed, Gavin informed me that he would tell me in which order to open the presents. The first one was something that looked something like a wonton made of tinfoil. “I’ve been saving this for you for a long time, dad” says Gavin. I unfold the taped tinfoil and inside I find 63¢. He is such a good kid. “There’s only one more dad, so I have to tell you to open this one” Gavin says with a smile. It’s larger than the tinfoil wonton and has no particular shape. I easily tear it open and find something I just would never suspect. Two pairs of safety goggles, two bags of 150-count rubber bands, and two wooden luger rubber-band guns. How awesome is that? Needless to say, there are now rubber-bands all over our house. Oh well. Leif will pick them up.

And that was my birthday. I couldn’t ask for much more than that. I got phone calls from my mother, father, and my sister. It was a good day.

For more 30th birthday fun though, I think I’ll go to Oahu to go to Gordon Biersch for dinner and then karaoke with my friends. Why not, right?