Birthday came, birthday went and as far as birthdays go, it was a nice one - gifts aplenty, cake, etc. I have since decided that, should my birthday fall on a weekday (and it will 5 times out of 7, obviously) will from now on, if I have the vacation days, take the day off of work. It’s just not as fun being at work knowing I could be at home with Amanda not working.

A quick summary of The Gifting: Rob Sheffield’s book, Love Is A Mix Tape, Clint Eastwood’s beautiful biography of Charlie Parker with Forest Whitaker in the title role, Bird, both seasons of the new Battlestar Galactica, The Devil And Daniel Johnston (a documentary about the fascinating manic depressive musician of the title that is getting rave reviews,) and Ricky Gervais’ Extras on DVD, plus, of course, a number of CDs, most of which I won’t name off for you, but, in a move that may have set the world temporarily tilted the wrong way because, if you know me, some are going to sound like odd choices for me - I’m all about surprises, man. Just to freak you out, I, weird jazz and hardly-known rock guy, feel I must mention that I got the latest from John Legend, Corinne Bailey Rae, and, the one that surprised me most for liking so damned much, Gnarls Barkley - all of them are good but the last is especially so. And even stranger, my parents, of all people, bought it first and I borrowed it to check out and then fell in love. Hell of a fun listen. One big benefit to not listening to radio nor watching MTV: “Crazy” is practically brand new to me. Don’t fret about the world being tilted, however, because things were probably righted for the world by me also receiving the big 3-disc Iron Maiden live DVD set that came out not too long ago. That’s balance.

And tonight was Alissa’s birthday - yes, that’s right, back to back birthdays. No we didn’t plan it that way. Anyway, I surprised her with a Nintendo Wii that was a hard-fought battle to track down a week ago - these things are still just as hot as the day the were released into stores, believe it or not. Not a single local store had them - believe me, I spent a lot of time and gas driving around fruitlessly - but I found a local seller on Ebay and therefore saved myself the shipping costs so I wound up getting it for only a little over retail. The way I figured, what initially sounded ridiculous - paying more than retail - became a decent idea when it became clear that I’d have to sit in a line for hours to possibly get one of the few that might make it to store shelves on the random days that Nintendo released them to stores. That didn’t sit well with me, and I really, really wanted Alissa to have one, so I bit the bullet, pulled the trigger, and probably several other cliches.

If anyone out there wanted to get either of us a gift, that’s awesome, but what I’d really like you to do is just to promise to start watching the CW’s Veronica Mars when it comes back on in late April. It’s the best drama on TV right now, and this is probably a good time to jump in for the 4 or 5 remaining episodes of the season to get a good idea of what the show’s like. If you’re frustrated with Lost* not giving you enough clues, watch VM - you’ll be choking on information and won’t know where to go next. Incredible show - smart, funny, and very well written. And, of course, it struggles. WATCH IT, I implore you - don’t let this go down in flames like Arrested Development. Consider it a gift for me.

*Hey, I still love Lost but can understand that some don’t. I won’t accept anything other than love for Veronica Mars. And, besides, VM star Kristen Bell? Guys, let me put it this way: you need to watch.

I know what you’re wondering. You’re wondering, “Hey, Tom, how did you spend the eve of your 34th birthday?” Well, I’ll tell you! I spent it spraying congealed vomit off of our sidewalk! It wasn’t my vomit, nor Alissa’s, nor Amanda’s, and I don’t think it was anyone’s that we knew, but I wasn’t about to go out of my way to find out whose it was because, as I’m sure some of you know, “you can’t really dust for vomit.”

As disgusting as it was - and it was spectacularly disgusting in both sight and smell - the spewer got an impressive spread. The initial impact site was a good two-foot area in diameter, but there were significant splatter effects for at least 6 feet all around. Stuck as I was staring at the mess, I was able to determine that the upchucking consisted of french fries, some sort of meat product (likely hamburger,) and a vanilla shake, the latter of which seemed to have helped it adhere to the concrete with an admirable amount of persistence. Eventually the mass broke up, little blobs decorating the street, but not without leaving an apparently indelible stain on the concrete to remind me of this wonderful afternoon spent celebrating the last hours of my 33rd year around the sun - and also why we will never, ever buy a house on the corner of a busy street again.

(It’s also a reminder of how I have indeed gotten older - just a couple of years ago, I surely would have gotten a before and after shot of the mass-ejection. I’m a little disappointed now, I have to admit.)

While I’m in a ranting mood, let me get this off my chest: if you’re going to bother going to church, at least commit. If you’re going to be a God-fearing church-goer, you should have to put it down that you’re a Lutheran, a Catholic, whatever. I’m glad to see these “megachurches” are uniting people of different races, but I don’t like the idea that people are going to, basically, concerts every week rather than going to a small local church. The little church down the street where the clergy knew your name is no longer something people crave - they just want these giant, impersonal, generic, non-denominational conglomerations because, I think, people are growing more and more distant from having anything that affects them personally. At a small church, the clergy knows you - and you’ll see them in your grocery store and they’ll recognize you back. In these giant churches, it’s like any rock concert - the churchgoers all recognize the pastor, but he’ll never know anyone there beyond the money they leave in the collection boxes. And, in this way, it makes it less of a burden to just go on about your daily life without really worrying about that friendly pastor finding you doing/saying/being something less than Christianly. With megachurch behind you, you’re just another unknown face in a giant crowd of unknown faces.

This is not to say I’m some religious zealot. I’m not. I don’t go to church. But I do think that when you want to do something you do it right and you do it with conviction. If you want to be a Christian, be one and commit to one of the many variations available. Our forefathers fought for this right to have all of these options, don’t let that fade away into one big generic goulash of Christianity. Hell, be a Quaker, or Amish! Now that’s different, that’s conviction!

Hey, screw you, Ikea. As usual, it’s the consumer that bears the blame for environmental woes, not the companies that produce products. Charging customers for bags? That SUCKS. I don’t care that it’s 5 cents - the cost is not the issue. It’s the principle. It’s the fact that you’re so big-headed that you think you can charge us - it’s the fact that you’re also a foreign company stepping in and, as usual, saying “Dirty Americans, you foul up our environment and for that we punish you!” Well guess what? It’s not us, the buying public’s fault - it’s the companies that produce this crap for us. Go after them and leave us the hell alone. I’m not going to drive around with a bunch of damned reusable bags filling up my trunk. How many of these things are they expecting us to carry? I know when I go to the grocery store I may only need one, or I may need 6 or 7, it just depends on how much stuff I’m buying. Do I really need to fill up my limited trunk space with those bags? And, of course, Ikea is going to charge you for their reusable bags. So I guess the environment isn’t so important that they can give those away, huh?

I’m sick and tired of everything being the public’s fault for using what’s out there for us to use. SCREW YOU, Ikea. I’ll take my dollars elsewhere if I feel like buying furniture. Maybe you should think about repackaging your damned furniture into less friggin’ boxes that just get thrown away. How about that?

*”Fartful” and “jerker” are names of desks that Ikea sells - the former is a children’s desk that means “speedy,” the latter is a Swedish man’s name.

Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a space junkie, so it should come as no surprise that I have to at least say something about this whole Space Diaper Murder Attempt situation.

What’s always been amazing about the space program is that it’s never been solely about the individual people. It’s been about the efforts of thousands and thousands of extremely gifted, talented, and resourceful people all working together to lift a small number of people skyward in the most complicated machinery that humankind can create. And it almost always works really well. We don’t normally see most of those hard-working people, and for most people, they don’t even see the few people who actually make it into space. And then something like this comes along and changes the focus from blurry to sharply focused on one very misguided, confused individual, yet the people’s scrutiny suddenly comes down on the entire space program. What they previously ignored all together they suddenly find is subject to their uneducated scrutiny and, generally, abject dismissal. This has, once again, ignited the age-old “the space program is a waste of money” arguments from people who couldn’t even tell you what the space program’s focus today consists of.

I ask that, instead of looking at this as a failure of NASA to detect a loon among the branches of the space program’s trees, they see it as an opportunity to fine tune the process by which they weed out those who are fit to fly in space. After over 45 years in space, it was bound to happen some time - someone with a less than solid grip on reality was bound to slip through. As many have said, better now than on a many months long trip to Mars in a couple of decades, right? That is, of course, if those who want to discount it don’t have their way and just simply shut down the whole space program. (It’ll never happen.)

You can’t see it, but if this post could blush, it would be doing so right now. Blogcritics has been choosing one contributor per month to shine their spotlight upon and for February, the light shines upon me. It seems that, in the four years I’ve been there (seriously - four years?!) I’ve managed to post close to 250 pieces there (along with many hundreds more comments on other writers’ articles.) Wow.

In the last week, I’ve been answering a bunch of questions from Lisa McKay, the editor in charge of this series, and now there’s a giant piece all about me up on Blogcritics. It’s probably more than you ever wanted to know about me, and maybe more than I ever wanted to know about me, actually. Don’t laugh too much, unless it’s laughing in a good way. With, not at.

Well, last week was fun. First Amanda came down with yet another cold around Monday, then Wednesday I woke up with a bit of a burning in my throat. That evening my parents called and said that my mom had gotten the cold that Amanda had so I decided it was in everyone’s best interest for me to stay home with her the next day rather than send her over to Alissa’s family to infect them. I woke up that morning with a much worse sore throat, but had a fun day with Amanda in between bouts of pain. Friday was much the same - my mom was worse, I was home with Amanda and bad TV. And I, too, was worse - but still just a very, very sore throat.

I made it all the way through this morning with that sore throat when it magically morphed into a cold. I could almost feel it transition. I slept terribly - I knew what was coming - awakened every hour or so because I couldn’t breathe, so stuffed up had I become all of a sudden. I awoke with the same awful aching, burning, scraping feeling in my throat, but within a few hours, I felt a heaviness make its presence known in my chest. By afternoon, my speech thickened, my voice lowered, and I spent a good amount of time running to blow my nose to no avail. And the sore throat? Virtually gone.

Amid this, I took on the task of reinstalling Windows because of some weird crap that happened a couple weeks ago, the fallout of which I’ve been dealing with for a couple of weeks because I ran out of time last weekend to do much of anything. But today, after 6 hours, I finally got back up on my feet. While I do like finding relative shortcuts like saving the Profiles folders out of Firefox and Thunderbird so I can reinstall the browser and email program exactly as they were in my previous setup, I’m just sick of having issues like this pop up. One little change, one little bad install (which is apparently what happened that weekend) and everything comes tumbling down in Windows-world. Well, by 9:00 tonight I finally had the majority of important programs reinstalled (browser, mail, Itunes, over 6 dozen Windows Updates, Avast virus scan, Spybot, and CD/DVD-burner/ripper apps,) but I still have myriad other little utilities that I may never fully remember to catch up on. Do you Mac people ever deal with stuff like this, or is it just “install OS and get on with life”?