Welp, here I am. Firmly ensconced in my thirties.

30 always seemed a bit tenuous, like I could just duck back inside my late twenties if I really felt like it. Dip in a toe; test the waters. But 31 is a solid bid. 30 is slipping your spare change in the slot machines as you cut through the casino floor, but 31 is sidling up to the blackjack table and slapping down a $100 bill. Deal me into my thirties, baby.

Only you probably shouldn’t call your blackjack dealer “baby.” Not sure they’d appreciate that.

Ideally, this would be the part of the post where I offer up a humorous insight into the universal human condition, but… I don’t know anything about that. I’m a year older, today. Okay. We all get older with every single second that passes. You reach a point where further analysis is useless. So then you just dig up the handful of baby photos of yourself that you have on hand and marvel about the passage of time, and about how much you’ve changed, and about how OH GOD BABIES LOOK SO SMALL AND WEIRD.

Also, my dad had a lot of hair in those days.

Proud that I'm in a blue onesie, here. Way to unintentionally subvert gender stereotyping, parents!

I may not have much to say about getting older, sure, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t exploit this non-occasion in order to partake of preposterous amounts of merriment. As you do.

The American Thanksgiving holiday is nigh, and while my birthday doesn’t fall on it this year, I have decided to usurp it entirely with a four-day weekend of me. That’s right. No turkey. No potatoes. No gravy. No cranberry sauce. No stuffing. No green beans and condensed cream of mushroom soup with those crunchy onion bits.

Whatever. I always thought that dish would be better if they just got rid of the green beans entirely, anyway.

We are having none of this Thanksgiving business. Come Thursday morning, the beau and I are headed up to Paso Robles for a weekend packed with our own version of excess. We’re staying in an old cottage that features an adjacent saloon — an actual 1886 saloon that was going to be torn down, but the owner managed to have it moved to his property. Our plan is to hang out in it, and to rent bikes and pedal around to nearby wineries and cheese tasting rooms.

Pretty ridiculous for an unimportant birthday, yeah?

What are you doing this weekend? Does it involve turkey? Chinese food? Tea? Fighting with your in-laws? Reorganizing your closets? What?