Rocket Trombone

Joint birthday cake for Dad and I, made by our friend Darlene, with a volleyball for him and a rocket trombone for me!

So I turned 29 this year.  Not really much of a milestone in itself, but it does mark the beginning of the last year of my twenties.  That’s also not that much of a big deal, but I’m sure my friends and family will rub it in plenty next year when I reach 30.  So I have that to look forward to, right?  Anyway, my birthday this year (my “1st Annual 29th Birthday” if you will) happened to fall on a weekend, which I think is the best kind of birthday.  Why have just one day of fun when you can have a whole weekend’s worth?

I’ll arbitrarily start with Thursday night, when my wife and I went rock climbing.  We’re still really enjoying this climbing thing, we even finally bought our own shoes a couple months ago.  But we don’t get to go very often, which is why I’ll treat this as a special event for this weekend, even if it actually had nothing to do with my birthday.

Friday night, the Flyers gave me a pretty awesome present, a 4-3 victory over Boston, sending them on to the Eastern Conference Finals against Montreal.  But this wasn’t just any win, this was Game 7 of the Conference Semifinals against Boston, and the Flyers had to fight back from being down 0-3 in the series to even reach Game 7.  Only twice in the history of the NHL has a team rallied from 0-3 in a best-of-seven series with four straight victories to take the series.  This game had plenty of suspense as well, as the Flyers found themselves in an early 0-3 hole, and scored 4 straight goals to win it 4-3.  This has also only happened twice previously in a Game 7 situation.  Since my birthday is always about a month after the regular season ends, it takes a pretty deep playoff run for the Flyers to still be playing by then.  They’ve accomplished that this year, which makes me very happy, but combining that with a comeback of this magnitude is simply amazing.  Despite the long, anxious week that passed during Games 4, 5, 6 and 7, this was an incredible event in Flyers history and I’m glad I was able to watch it!

Feeling much relieved on Saturday morning, I headed up to Dad’s house to spend a day working on the bimmer.  I know I haven’t written about the car on here in a very long time, but that’s mostly because work all but stopped over the winter, when it was just too cold to be in the garage.  But we’re back at it now, and continuing work on the interior.  We spent the entire day fighting with one of the interior door panels.  It turns out some of these new parts just don’t fit together quite as easily as the old ones did!  So we ended up not making as much progress as we hoped we would, but we have a good idea what we need to do to make putting the other door together go much smoother next time I go up.  Anyway, much more on that later, and I’ll get some new pictures up too.  The interior is looking amazing!

Mom behind the wheel of the Bimmer

When we finished up our work, Mom and Randy came by to take me out to dinner.  But first, they had to see the car!  This was the first time Mom had seen any of the work Dad and I have done to the bimmer, and I think she was pretty impressed.  We took it for a short spin around the block.  I let her drive, of course, since it was her car long before it was given to me!  Then we headed into Newark for a nice dinner at Caffé Gelato, and I drove back to Maryland.

Sunday morning, my wife cooked up a big breakfast for the two of us, which was fantastic.  Then,  my sister and a bunch of our friends gathered for the Wine In The Woods festival in Columbia.  As the name implies, WitW is a wine festival held on the grounds of Merriweather Post Pavilion, known as Symphony Woods.  There is food, live music, lots of local art for sale and wine tasting tents from over 30 Maryland wineries!  Some of the wineries we had seen before, either at the Maryland Wine Festival or by actually visiting them, but others were new.  They allowed unlimited tasting this year, unlike in the past when you bought a strip of tickets to redeem for wine samples, so in theory I suppose it was possible to visit all of the tasting tents, but I wasn’t about to try.  You know, something about wanting to actually enjoy the wine and maybe even remember it the next day.  I would guess we managed to stop at about a third of the wineries.  I suppose that’s why it’s a two-day festival!  Either way, everything we tried was pretty good, and we ended up buying some wine to take home.  The lone disappointment was that Matt and I couldn’t find any deep fried cheesecake…

After the festival, we headed home and I again donned my Flyers jersey to watch Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals against Montreal.  The Flyers won in commanding style, shutting out the Canadiens 3-0.  So a very busy and extremely fun weekend came to a close on a happy note.  Thanks to everyone who was a part of it, you definitely made for a very memorable birthday!  Let’s do it again next year!