Since I seem to have activated my away-from-home batsignal, here are the SMS messages I've sent to Twitter in the past 24 hours. My tweets are normally friends-only, but when I'm away from home they're usually more interesting than the usual 'OMG where's my tea?' claptrap, so I've written a script to post them publicly in batches once daily while I'm gone.

Since I seem to have activated my away-from-home batsignal, here are the SMS messages I've sent to Twitter in the past 24 hours. My tweets are normally friends-only, but when I'm away from home they're usually more interesting than the usual 'OMG where's my tea?' claptrap, so I've written a script to post them publicly in batches once daily while I'm gone.

It was late, and our words were quiet. The house slept around us, snoring noises emanating from the various rooms."It's not so much about turning thirty," I said. "I've earned this number, and I have no reason to hide from it, but…"

"The round number makes it easy and natural to take stock of your life."

I whispered agreement. Conversations like these don't often take place during the light of day; they are the omnipresent thoughts, but the last to be voiced. First in, but last out; only after the chitchat and the catching-up conversations are exhausted do the soul-searching words tumble out as the friend's hand reaches for the metaphysical doorknob of sleep.

I write this here knowing that he will see it, knowing that I'll dread the moment he comes home, wanders off to his computer, and eventually spots these words, because it'll likely happen while I'm here. None of these words will surprise him, but it's the first time I've acknowledged any of them openly.

Well, according to my computer's clock, we just wrapped up the year 28. That was … eventful.

What's 29 got in store? Anyone got any ideas?

Well, I do: I just took my meds, and they're about to make me tump over, so my first Official Prognostication for my birthday is that I will now sleep. Deeply. Until six a.m., when my evil little Tenzing (who, by the way, the vet says is 14 pounds now) will wake me up because he's huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuungry.

Then he'll eat two bites and go back to sleep.

Obnoxious little twit.

"I always get kinda thinky on this day. Don't mind me; it'll pass. It was just a day picked by my mother's obstetrician, but somewhere along the way, along the years, it became 'my' day.
Birthdays: the one day a year our maudlin reflections are truly excused. Luckily, I'm keeping it short & sweet this year.

Misty gets the best auntie birthday present of all: a nephew born on her birthday … the newest bald member of the Granade family.(*ducks*)

Congratulations to Andrew and Joy, whose first child Samuel Nathan was born today. We're still trying to figure out how someone as small as Joy managed to gestate an eight-pound child without, uh, exploding. (Does the C-section count?)

Of course, it turns out that little Sam scored a 9/10 on his Apgars. Nothing like starting a pattern of high achievement from the start.

I was supposed to be asleep. Every now and then, for some reason, even with the best of modern pharmaceuticals, my body just gets determined to stay awake. Therefore, it's well past three in the morning and here I am, glorying in the quietness of my new keyboard in the partially-cleaned computer room.See, I'm plotting. That never bodes well.

I always get kinda thinky on this day. Don't mind me; it'll pass. It was just a day picked by my mother's obstetrician, but somewhere along the way, along the years, it became 'my' day.(Hey, I was breech, and my mother was tiny. They took no chances…and you in the back, the one that just piped up and said "Even from birth you were determined to show your ass!" -- I heard that, you little prankster. No cookies for you!)

You are cleaning right now, sorting clothes into 'keep' and 'donate' piles, with the end hope of having a usable closet again. I am in the computer room, new music playing, cooling down from my second workout of the day and trying to give you the room you need to finish your task in the space of a day.

A day, this day, your thirtieth birthday.

On the day I married you, I stood there, twenty-one, wondering what in the world we'd manage to do with our lives if we walked in the same direction.

It's been so long since the discovery of the synchronicity of our birthdays that the magic of it is a little lost on us now: yours the sixteenth, your sister Lori's the eighteenth, mine the twentieth. Instead, over the years, October has just become 'our month'; a birthday week shared by us and, later, unwittingly, by two cats who were born five years ago, sometime between your birthday and mine.

Since you didn't ask, a few explanations, on this, a birthday. Heavy on the cryptic, but if someone ever said that we were supposed to be self-explanatory on our birthdays, he was shot before his message reached me.

One for each year:

(whap) "Tenzing, get OFF the fabric!"
MEOW! (indignant)
(sound of cat being tossed across the room)
(sound of cat jumping onto fabric)
"Edmund!"
(sound of cat being tossed across the room)
(sound of cat jumping onto fabric)
"TENZING!"
(sound of cat being tossed across the room)
(sound of spouse laughing) "Got help, hmm?"

...and so it goes, and so it goes.