A good birthday!

What makes a good birthday you ask? 75 clean & jerks (this is where you take the weight from the ground, bring it to your shoulders, then sort of press it halfway overhead and sort of jump underneath the bar, although in my case this was more of a push press because I hadn’t practiced jerks in a while and the weight was light enough that I didn’t really need to get under the bar…), 50 ring rows, 100 pushups, 150 squats, plus a bonus round for good measure. What a fun workout! I used a little bit too light of a weight I think, though … I was afraid of that, but I was more afraid of the weight being too heavy. But c’est la vie, it was still pretty hard and good fun! Did I mention fun? Ok maybe I have a bit of a twisted idea of fun…

What was not so much fun was all the mobility stuff we did after the workout. The first one with my hips was one of the most painful tortures I think I have ever done, the ones with the shoulders on the bar were better but mainly because my shoulders had been quite tight and needed the stretch, and I practiced putting myself into that mental state I mentioned before. It’s actually pretty easy as long as you’re not thinking about the movement you are doing. I should try it sometime with one of these ridiculous walking lunge workouts that we’re probably due for any day …

Yeah, so after that I went back home to shower and clean up a bit before heading over to the Old Biscuit Mill for my weekly shopping. But, I got distracted by the food court and even though I wasn’t hungry the “two egg Thai breakfast” attracted my attention, so I bought some food. Then as I was walking back out I literally nearly tripped over some of the guys from the gym. I knew they were going there but still, it was pretty funny, although then again it’s pretty impossible to go to this market without seeing someone that you know – I ran into a co-worker on the way into the food court area.

So these gentlemen had between them purchased five chocolate muffins the size of my head, and a bag of cookies that were also quite large. So much for not eating sugar… dunno, at least for me I don’t have very good self-control so either I do not eat something or I will tend to eat too much of it, so best just not to buy such things! This gathering pretty quickly turned into quite the collection of CCFers as three other guys from our gym showed up and we proceeded to hang out near the bar. There was some microbrewery selling something called Boston Lager which someone kindly bought for me seeing as it was my birthday and all. This is the second good beer I had had in this country (the first one being months ago at Hudson’s on Kloof). Oddly enough, it was passably close to Sam Adams although much lighter in color. Either that or my taste in beer has degraded significantly, which is the more likely scenario! My next beer was I think called Whale’s Tail Pale Ale, and tasted pretty similar to the Boston Lager. But whatever, a microbrew is still infinitely better than a Castle, and at R17 or thereabouts (that’s about $2.50 I think) the price is right.

Oh and I got peer pressured into eating one of the aforementioned chocolate muffins. Now I didn’t really realise until after I ate the damn thing and felt extremely ill (and then REALLY wanted a nap about an hour later!) that this was not really a fair thing. The guys who were each also eating a muffin will normally eat 3-4 times as much as I do in any given meal so for me to eat one muffin because each of them was, was, birthday or no birthday, about the equivalent of each of them eating 3 muffins! Hearing later that they each had another one muffin and then crashed on the couch for two hours was a bit … well, no comment.

Had a nice time just chilling there but around 2pm I realised I should go buy my meat so I went and did so, and the guy threw in a whole package of sausage for free! And he had no idea it was my birthday! OK so I shouldn’t be eating much sausage but nevertheless … free grass fed meat!!

Following that I ran a few errands, then home to work on making guacamole. I am not sure why this always seems to take me so long and I was so mad I realized at the end of the night that I forgot to add the onions! WTF.

So I had a small house party and it was great! A surprising amount of people actually begged off at the last minute (sick or something, well whatever), but for the most part *cough I’m not naming any names here…* the people that I wanted to come came, so from that perspective it was perfect. I actually didn’t want a lot of people but I didn’t want to not invite people either so the way it turned out was exactly as I wanted.

After a certain point my memory is a bit fuzzy (well, I had been drinking since about 1pm…) but I do remember learning about a sport called underwater hockey which I think I must try, and I heard the words Legion of Doom (well, together in a sentence that is) for the first time in probably 10 years. That made me about as happy as anything, well, ok, that’s a big fat lie… if the Flyers had actually beaten the Blackhawks a few months back that would have been better. Anything else I want to say at this point … hmm, can’t think of anything. Anyway. Good birthday, all things considered.

The next day I didn’t feel like getting out of bed. So I didn’t, for a while. Then I just took the day completely off, begged off of everything and did a little bit of shopping, went to the beach to read, cooked an early dinner and went to bed really early. This turned out to be a good decision the next morning but at the moment it’s about time for me to get to bed for this evening so that story will just have to wait!