birthday

[redbird]

cattitude took me out to dinner tonight to celebrate my birthday at a bistro near my office, L'Express. I had two appetizers—a crab cake and an onion tart—and dessert. The crab cake was just right, soft and sweet and crabby rather than bready, and came with a bit of salad dressed with good olive oil. The onion tart was the sort of not-quite-as-expected that I enjoy, in the general area of my expectations and also very good. (I'd thought it would be a small tart with a crisp shell; this was a piece cut from a rectangle, with little crust, and lots of soft onion flavor. For dessert I got an apricot creme brulee, which was every bit as crisp as it should have been. Again a small surprise, with actual chunks of apricot (the menu also offered vanilla, and I expected this to be apricot-flavored in the same sort of way that a dessert might be vanilla-flavored).

This was a lower-key outing than some years, but tasty. It was also closer to my birthday than we've managed in a few years. (Yesterday I went to the gym and saw Emilie, because that's what I usually do on Thursdays, and it's something I like enough that it fit with a birthday that's also a workday. So gym notes. This is from memory, mostly:
Cardio, 16 minutes, top heart rate 124 (part on a treadmill, then two different bikes)
Rolled out IT band etc.
Hamstring bridge, 4 sets of 9
Ab work on small ball, I think 3 sets of 10
Squats, 3 sets of 15
Calf raises, 2 sets of 15
Balance stuff: played catch standing on the foam roller

Standing on balance platform:
Lat pulldown, 50 pounds, 3 sets of 12
(on the ground,) "hug a tree", 20 pounds, 2 sets, couldn't get the position right and my right shoulder kept hurting so they were both short sets
Back on platform, the back exercise, 20 pounds, 3 sets of 12
Triceps, 20 pounds, 3 sets of 12
The one where she wraps the green elastic around my wrists and I move them away from my midline, not sure how many. We hadn't done that in a while.
)

I also got an unexpected birthday gift: Amazon has released an update of the Stanza ebook reader, so it works again after Apple broke it with iOS 5. This is apparently going to be the last update, but it's one more than we were expecting; they seemed to have more-or-less abandoned the software after buying Lexcycle. "Also" meaning in addition to Cattitude buying me chocolate, and birthday cards and email from friends and relatives. (And a very weird set of phone messages from the company we have renter's insurance through, left by someone who seemed to be having trouble remembering the English for "Feliz cumpleaños" or finding someone to help her.)