Yesterday was pretty darned good, if I do say so myself. Among other things, I turned 48. (This is arguable, as I was born in Taiwan, on the other side of the International Date Line, so the actual moment of my birth is I believe sometime late the night of June 5th here in USAnia. Maybe I ought to calculate this some day.)

There was an insane flood of good wishes on Facebook and Twitter all the day long, as well as a ton of emails from friends, family and fans. Thank you so much to everybody. The sheer volume means I can’t respond personally to most of it. But you know what? That’s kind of cool in its way, too.

Beyond that, I had a pretty normal workday. This was punctuated by lunch with the always effervescent kenscholes. He administered my ritual birthday kiss, catching it on his phone cam thusly:

As Pam Bainbridge-Cowan said on my Facebook comment thread for this photo, “Hell, I never realized just how long Ken’s tongue is!”

After work, @PDXjerseygirl dropped by with a lovely bunch of flowers she’d scored at the Portland Farmer’s Market. It was terrific to see her. Then I hit dinner with my family at the Chart House, whereupon I had a delightful lava cake as my postprandial sugar-carb chaser.

Then my loving family produced my present.

Wow.

Yes, that is a genuine Jay Lake bobblehead. Apparently procuring this was a serious comedy of errors. Credit for the idea and managing the execution goes to my brother, Michael Lake. Allegedly more of these can be ordered from the manufacturer, so once I get the details from my brother I’ll post them here in case any of you are feeling especially spendthrift.

After dinner, I took tillyjane (a/k/a my mom) back to the house of my injured friend, where she had already spent the day being a Hero of the Revolution caring for my friend, thus freeing me to enjoy my birthday. Once I’d checked in on my friend (who is having surgery today to deal with her major fracture), I headed out again for my final engagement of the day.

That was a delightful later evening with visiting friend Lisa Costello. We had a very nice time hanging out together. I wasn’t paying attention to the weather when I parked my car, so when I came back out to drive home, I discovered it had rained pretty heavily, and was in fact still raining. There didn’t seem to be much point in putting the top up then, so I drove home with the top down in the rain.

On arriving home, I discovered another lovely bouquet of birthday flowers courtesy of Mother of the Child.

Today workie bits, and the_child returns from her California sojourn. Plus more friend time this evening. Tomorrow the JayCon prefestivies begin, including a food cart cruise and some late night hot tubbing. Saturday, of course, is JayCon XII [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]. Sunday is the wind-down from JayCon, plus the eight grade end-of-year picnic.

Writing? What writing?

Photos © 2012 Ken Scholes and Mary Elizabeth Lake, reproduced with permission.

Bobblehead photo © 2012 Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.