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This card was waiting for me when I got home – THANKS, DEBBIE!!! I love it!

It was a really early start – I had to be in the office by 7am as I’d switched shifts with someone. And it was my birthday, and it was my day to keep an eye on queues and emails, but of course we were short 2 agents and we had lots of calls, so forget keeping and eye on emails and queues. In the middle of all the chaos, some pretty flowers arrived at my desk, courtesy of my nice hubbeh.

Finally, finally, after messing around with records that weren’t cooperating and ticketless airlines that had to be called and dealing with weird problems, I finally had to leave, after leaving a longer list of things to watch for my co-worker and friend Gio. Ugh, I hated that, but I’d already been there 45 minutes too long. The calls continued like that until closing, Gio told me later. Ugh.

Finally got home, and had been looking forward all day to dinner at the Weber Grill, which is really a chain of restaurants owned by the local kettle grill manufacturers – and their food is awesome. Everything is grilled, except for the drinks (and maybe some of the desserts).

Good food. Nice hubbeh. I had a really tasty marlin with a kind of curry sauce, and David had a half-slab of ribs. He very kindly asked if I wanted any notice taken by the restaurant of my birthday, and I said “not really, it’ll just tempt me into dessert.”

As it is, that herb cheese spread with their cardamom bread about did me in, and then the little pot of garlic mashed potatoes were teh yum.

Discovery: Goose Island Brewery makes an awesome Spiced Ginger soda drink, TEH YUM.

And then I played around on Second Life listening to Glenn Greenwald on Virtually Speaking, as I read one of his books (How Would A Patriot Act). Afterwards, I danced and danced with my virtual friends to great music, drinking real wine, the end.