So as of yesterday I’m in decade number 3.

I thought that turning 30 would feel weird, like a loss of freedom or the extra weight of adult responsibility, but while I do sort of feel that I’ve lost an excuse, things feel alright. Much of that is my father’s doing — my parents separated when I was 7 and they were 29 and 30, and they had shared custody, and my father had a blast in his 30s and I was there for it, so I don’t see any reason why things would have to get boring for me. And having Candice around to share it with makes it even better — I think I’d be a lot less confident about this whole 30 thing if I was alone. But Nyxie makes everything better, so that’s no huge surprise. I’m still one of the youngest in my department at work, which helps a bit too. Besides, I’ve already started my midlife crisis, so I could at least get the numbers up there to match. It doesn’t hurt for motorcycle insurance prices, either.

My birthday inconveniently fell on Wednesday night this year, which is Nyxie’s rough day of the week and not exactly a great one for me either, so we celebrated last weekend. Nyxie cooked me dinner — phyllo-wrapped dill-marinated salmon, latkes, and French beans — and baked me a huge pumpkin zucotto, the size of a large mixing bowl. We’re still working on the zucotto a week later. So good, but so BIG, especially after a lot of fish and latkes!

Nyxie bought me We ♥ Katamari, the sequel to Katamari Damacy. It’s so great. The one weak point of the first Katamari is that it was a lot of the same kind of rolling up things, so you could really only play so long at a stretch before you’d had enough. The new one mixes it up without making it not about rolling things up: rolling underwater, at high speed, against the clock, and in a lot of specific situations that are a lot less annoying than the “roll up the biggest bear you can find” that just about had me ready to throw the controller through the television. I’m probably about half done already (six cut-screens in) and the first one took months of dabbling to finish. No spoilers in the comments, please! She also bought me this octopus shirt, but I’m a dork and threaten to buy myself things a couple of weeks before my birthday, and she had to tell me at the end of October that I shouldn’t buy that shirt because she had already ordered it, so I’ve had it for a while now. Woops!

Mom swung by quickly last night to wish me a happy birthday and give me a present of a pair of Sennheiser PX100 headphones (and a pasta pot, because I had mentioned that the teflon-coated pasta pot she had given me years ago was starting to de-teflon!). I’ve been listening to music at work through these Denons that I bought ages ago when I wanted something to block out Metro and traffic and library noise in Montreal, but they’re way too warm and clampy to wear for a whole workday. The PX100s are fantastic. Great open-backed sound and I can hardly feel them on, and they fold up so I can slip them in my laptop bag easily to keep them with me.

Dad, Golda, Kieran and Sarah are coming up to Ottawa from Belleville the weekend after this coming one to take me out to dinner because this coming weekend Nyxie and I are heading to Nova Scotia for her brother’s wedding reception. I get to meet the whoooole family, eek! It’ll be good even if it’s a bit disconcerting because a lot of her older and more distant relatives probably won’t make the trek to Ottawa for our wedding next summer. Still, I’m looking forward to getting back Sunday night! I don’t mind my birthday spanning nearly a month, though.