happy birthday bug!!

birthdays are kind of a big deal. whether you use them as an excuse to draw attention to yourself (my favorite approach) or just as an excuse to pack your day as full as possible with random things (meghan’s approach), you just can’t complain with a birthday. here is a sample list of what we did for meghan’s birthday yesterday:


free day at the denver botanical gardens (it also helps to share a birthday with earth day) we got to visit the tropical steam room that reminded me (but didn’t make me homesick for) d.c. summers. a good indicator of not fun humidity is when your glasses fog up upon entry.



also since most people associate delicate lovely flowers with over-sized disturbing bugs, the botanical gardens decided to combine the two and add giant statues of various garden bugs (made me want to run right out to my local greenhouse and get some flowers to start my own garden). my favorite bug was the one with a rotary saw on its back. i was a little bit disappointed when meghan informed me that the saw doesn’t actually spin. what kind of cruel joke is that?

next we went to the denver aquarium, which is probably about my favorite aquarium ever. they’ve figured out that most people are getting bored pretty quickly looking at fish, which is why aquarium profits have gone down 32% over the past five years (i’m completely making up all traces of that statistic). but the denver aquarium doesn’t stop at fish. no no – the denver aquarium has real life tigers! who knew tigers had anything to do with fish?? three big ol’ tigers strutting their stuff and eating any fish in their way…seems like a bad investment to buy something that eats your main attraction right? wrong! the tigers are great. i’m still not sure what they’re actually doing at the aquarium, but i like it all the same.












another thing the denver aquarium has is tandem bike rentals. you can rent a lovely surrey bike for a measly $12 per half-hour and ride around the platte river. this is what we decided to do. how could we resist? the dumb thing had a canopy and a little bell! we made some friends and probably some enemies on that thing. one biker tried to get around us (we were kind-of large) and biffed it on the gravel…we rang our bell as an “i’m sorry” gesture. we even tried off-roading a little bit, but got stuck and had to push our bike out of the rocks. it was probably the best half hour of my life.


finally, we went to a decemberists concert. the concert itself was great – especially the part where they were singing about a whale eating everybody and then a whale actually came out on the stage and “ate” the entire band.



the concert was definitely shadowed by what was going on right in front of us. a fabulously nerdy girl and a guy were being very cuddly – holding hands, kissing…the whole bit. we thought it was cute and made some comment about how the right people find each other. then, the girl turns around and kisses the boy directly in front of her! they started holding hands and smooching! turns out there were about 4 guys surrounding this girl and she was acting all lovey dovey with all of them and they all knew about it…it was really bizarre. meghan had to drag me to a different area because apparently i was “ruthlessly staring” (i don’t think meghan used the word “ruthlessly” – after all she is only 23, you can’t expect genius yet)

so all in all i have no complaints about the day. wait – one complaint about the day. next time, i’d like the saw on the back of the giant bug to spin. happy birthday meghan!!