I had a wonderful birthday.

We went out to Chantanee Noodle in Bellevue, and invited a bunch of friends & family. About 13 people showed up, and we had a wonderful time. The good food didn't hurt, the conversation was good, and I got a few cool things. It was a wonderful birthday.

Birthdays have really transformed over the years for me. When you are 18 or younger, you look forward to balloons, colorful toys, and so on- but after maybe 21, birthdays are really marginalized in the grown up world. It's a little off-putting, because you remember these really fun celebrations where everyone focuses on *you* in a human I'm selfish sort of way, but you grow up, the parties go away, the balloons go away, and people move on. Man, shouldn't we celebrate them MORE because, hey, look, we're still ALIVE!!? :)

I got a few things I'm excited about:

• Several Philip K. Dick novels and short stories. I've been interested in some of the older, original sci-fi works from the 60s when the sci-fi revolution started. Philip K. Dick is the author of some of the great ones that really started a lot more of the philosophical side of Sci-Fi, such as: paycheck, minority report, iRobot (do androids dream of electric sheep?) bladerunner, Total Recall, and others. The movie adaptations add a litle more action and take out some of the more thoughtful futuristic society pieces, but are still good movies in my opinion.
• A car care kit from Griots Garage. It's just a little travel sized guy, but I love Griot's products.
• A gift card to Guitar Center to pick up a Cajon (box drum). I really want a box drum to keep exploring different percussion instruments I can play in sort of an acoustic unplugged sort of way, as that is how we've been playing at young adults. Most people would consider the cajon a better option than a djembe for the rock style stuff I play anyways, but I've got a lot more experience with the djembe and was able to make that work pretty well. Unfortunately, my extensive djembe experience is leaving behind some more of my basic percussion stuff that I need to focus on to make sure I'm still a well rounded musician. I need to focus some more on right left balance, triplets, and integrating some more rythms into my repertoire.

I'm looking forward to shopping for one. Unfortunately my local guitar center doesn't have hardly any cajons, just a standard pearl model, so I'll haveto visit a few other guitar centers around the area to see if any of them have a Meinl in stock.

So, we did so well in the last tournament (our first) that we decided to sign up for another one. There was this little 3 man tournament planned for this weekend up at CDR Park, past everett a ways. It interested us because it was slightly cheaper and the winners get Proto SLGs (paintball guns). Only 6 teams are signed up including us, and the top 3 teams get prizes.

And three of the other teams are teams we've played at the survivor series- one, we played vs and tied, and they went on to get 4th, and the other two did terrible and were destroyed. And the other two teams signed up look like newbie teams, never played in a tourney before.

So, we have a *really* good shot at winning. We feel like we are better than the team we tied out vs last tourney, but we made a mistake to lose it. If we correct our mistakes, I think we're better than them.

Luke can't really afford this tournament unfortunately, but I think Xylem and I will cover him and if we win, we'll just take his winnings. :) If we win the Proto SLGs, I'll just take his probably, since I paid for his last 3 outings and the last tournament and this one. That about covers it, and then I'll just sell the SLGs online and see if I can take that cash and my backup gun, and get a newer nicer pball gun without spending anything. that'd be sweet :)

I'm not sure if there will be pictures of this event like the last one. If there are, I will post them. I'm not as excited about this one, because there are less teams- but I feel thats why we did so well, because we were really amped up. So I need to get amped up! But I'm so busy this week, it'll be hard to spend some time working on my gear and whiteboarding out some strategies.

One of the things I'm doing this week is recording two djembe tracks for Justin Hebert, and a city church special CD. That should be really cool. That, and I've got a monthly thursday night worldwide all hands meeting for work, and band practice for young adults. Busy week... but I'm taking friday and working from home, so hopefully that will give me enough time to clean my gear and amp myself up.