Fun

Belated birthday party: accomplished. It was a small group, but in its own way, that's just as good as having a cast of thousands -- everyone got to talk to everyone else, and it was actually possible to have the whole group in a single conversation. Last year I did brunch, so this year I went the other way: dessert. T made his signature chocolate cake, SE and SF made cookies and brought *homemade lemon curd* (oh so yummy), and R and S made chocolate cream pie. Tasty stuff. Add a smattering of nuts, fruit, and cheese, and you almost don't need dinner.

I may have a dessert party and a brunch in alternate years from here on out; both strike me as very civilized ways to celebrate a birthday. But in the future, I should probably decide to have the party more than a week in advance. Today was just a little on the crazy side, in terms of running around to get everything done. Worth it, though.

Plans!

Lately (if by lately, you mean "for the last several months"), T and I have been discussing a possible a trip to Italy. In theory, we try to take an international trip every other year, but it hasn't worked out that way, largely because we were planning to go on a family trip to China last year, which then fell through. So we turned our sights back toward Europe. I've wanted to go to Italy for very many years. I still remember sitting in class with JR, first in Form of the City, but also in pretty much every architecture class we took together, looking at slides of temples and palaces and piazzas and nudging each other: "Let's go there. And there. And there, and there." Thanks to my trips to Paris, Barcelona, and Japan, I've now been to some of those places. But so many of those pictures were taken in Italy. And of those, many of the most compelling were in Rome. So Rome has been at the top of my "places to go before I die" list for a long, long time.

Today, we booked a hotel and a flight. Leaving at the end of April, going for a week. Right now we're only planning on Rome, although a day trip to Pompeii or somewhere else within a do-able bus ride could be in the cards. We have a little time to plan.

After all this time talking about it, thinking about it, dreaming about it, now it looks like it's really going to happen. I don't quite believe it yet, though. Probably I won't actually believe it until I'm sitting on the plane.