To invite Shaggy, or not?

This past Friday marked the two-weeks-away date of my 29th birthday, and I’ve been trying to figure out what I want to do to celebrate. Planning something for my *actual* birthday - which is finally on a Friday - would be fun, except one of my friends is on travel for work that week and would be unable to attend. I could plan something for Saturday… except there’s a 50/50 chance that the grandparents will arrive to relieve me of my dog-sitting on Saturday, which means I need to clean house in preparation of turning it over for a week. Harumph.

Yesterday, after a morning mani/pedi with Mom for Mother’s Day, Sarah S-E and I drove up to Baltimore to meet with Nevin, our CND professor. Nevin is pretty dang awesome… so much so that NOT staying in touch with him after graduation is inexcusable. We had a bit of an adventure finding the restaurant - an Irish pub where I ordered a steak and portabello mushroom boxty, which is all that goodness wrapped up like a burrito with a potato pancake (YUMMY!) - and then spent four hours forgetting the time and chatting about all sorts of things: master’s projects, school politics, getting published, children killing car engines, crazy urban phone messages to the wrong person, the fact that I’m still “without a man,” and that Nevin can now tell us apart and we no longer have a class with him.

On the way up to out rendesvous with Nevin, Sarah and I were talking about my birthday and possible options for celebration. I could:

1. have a few people over for a cookout/firepit evening on Friday night,
2. try to set up a 2nd annual BYOChair outdoor movie night at my parents’ house for Friday or Saturday night,
3. wait ’til Saturday, and plan to meet all friends out at a restaurant or bar,
4. rent a bunch of movies and hang out in my PJs with the dogs, or
5. get a few people together to go to Pimlico race track for a day - and actually, Saturday, May 17 is the 133rd running of the Preakness! 

It’s a conundrum of indecision. But at least I don’t have to decide whether or not to invite Shaggy…