A Birthday Celebration

Sunday was my birthday, and I wrote a post, which was essentially a letter of complaint, about how the day ended. The rest of the day, however, wasn’t as bad, and in fact was quite good. My personal form of celebration is to go to movies, which I have done every year for the last 20-some years, with one exception (but that’s another story). My record is 6, and that took some planning. Usually these days  I manage two, one with a kid and one by myself.

I started out with August, Déla and Ciárán and the four of us caught Winnie The Pooh. It was an enjoyable enough film, capturing the spirit of the 1977 feature, but it really felt artificially short. Essentially, the negative reviews the film is getting might be by people who are missing the point of who the target audience is. My verdict is go ahead and take your young kids. Even my 8 year old enjoyed it.

Then in the afternoon, I was going to go to a film by myself, followed by dinner, then an evening film with August and Déla. The plan was to see Thor at 1:30, but I had to change those plans on the way to the theater. Well, I didn’t HAVE to, but I elected to. At 1:25 I was still at least 10 minutes away from the theater – one which is notorious for having difficult parking. It’s a “second run” theater in a residential neighborhood, and unlike most theaters, they don’t show commercials or copious amounts of trailers before the film. I figured I’d have another opportunity at some other point to catch the film, so rather than be late and miss the first several minutes (which I cannot stand), I changed course. I wound up headed to a different theater, one that I knew I would arrive at on time and caught Captain America.

birthday card 2011Dinner was Red Robin, and after dropping people off at home, August, Déla and I headed out for Kung Fu Panda 2. That didn’t go nearly as well, which I detailed yesterday in my blog post/letter. I don’t expect to hear back from them, but thought I’d at least voice my dissatisfaction.

All in all I had a pretty good birthday. Yes, I got a couple of presents, but the homemade card from my daughter was my favorite.