Brandon planned a special birthday surprise for me, but the thing that he wanted to do wouldn’t coincide with my actual birthday (much earlier this month); instead, it was last night. So, we got our nerves in gear and arranged to have our friends Andrew and Kristin, who we love muchly, watch Katie overnight. (Kristin is not only terrific with Katie in general, but she’s also watched her before — when we went scuba diving in Hawaii, for example.) I was a pile of nerves about leaving my mommy-centric kiddo home, and this would be the first night of her life that I’ve been away from her (almost 16 months!!!). However, I wasn’t going to miss my birthday surprise, even though I didn’t know what it was. :)
Kristin came over, played with Katie for a while, and then I put her down for a nap, telling her that she was going to spend the night playing with Auntie Kristin but that I wanted to make sure that Mommy helped her get a good rest first. We then gave K/A last-minute instructions (“Eat anything you want”) and left while Katie was still sleeping (cue: guilt).
We drove to the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco, where we were staying. Brandon won a night there in a raffle after donating money to an AIDS bike-a-thon at work, and he decided that this was the night we would use it. :) I’ve rarely stayed in hotels in San Francisco for obvious reasons (like, I’ve always lived near there — the one time I did stay in one was when Murray and I came out for American Psychiatric Association conference) but I do know from my limited experience that holy cow, are those rooms sizable for a city hotel. They’re also VERY cush! They left me chocolates in the room wishing me a happy birthday, which made me smiley.
We had eaten breakfast late that morning and failed on lunch altogether, so we were both hungry around now (4ish). We wandered around Chinatown until we eventually made our way to North Beach and O’Reilly’s Irish Pub, where Brandon had reservations for us at 5 (so we were about half an hour early). We were trying to be leisurely in order to make sure we had room at the end of the meal for bread pudding (OMG I love bread pudding), so we ordered the smoked salmon with Irish bread, which was very delicious. A Guinness was savored. Eventually, we ordered our meals — I stole B’s thunder by having the shepherd’s pie (he LOVES shepherd’s pie and always laments when we go to a restaurant that does shepherd’s pie with beef, which is in actuality a type of COTTAGE pie) and he enjoyed the lamb stew. The shepherd’s pie was very cheesy and delicious (the lamb was incredibly tender), but there was no way I would be able to finish it, much less have bread pudding on top. So, I had that wrapped up, and we ordered the bread pudding — it was great.
We walked back and stopped at the Victoria Pastry Company, to purchase things to snack on late at night/for breakfast, when B realized he’d left his credit card at the restaurant. We picked it up and headed back to the hotel. We had about 15 minutes before he received a call and told me that we needed to head to BART (I knew we were going to the East Bay for whatever it was next — it was at Oracle Arena, so I truly had NO IDEA what the heck we were seeing). So we get outside to find… a LIMO waiting for us. It was AMAZING. They had champagne and sparkling cider and it was SO super cush to go to the show that way.
When we got to Oracle Arena I could see no signage telling me what the show was. So, we walked up the hill towards the entrance and I see two words:
I almost died on the spot. I started jumping up and down in excitement and joy. I mean, WOAH, I never thought in my life I’d get to see him — I hadn’t even known he was coming to the Bay Area — and B completely surprised me! We went inside and our seats were AMAZING, almost on the floor. He had his twitter feed showing on a big screen before the show and during intermission, which was great, because people were saying a lot of amazing things (peppered in between people who weren’t there saying hi or lamenting their absence, or people who’d seen the show trying to do “in” jokes, which was annoying as crap). I had a couple of tweets show up:
@eddieizzard I am so excited to be seeing you — my hub surprised me so I had no idea who we were seeing until just now. Best birthday EVER!
@eddieizzard If someone tweeted “drop your pants if you love Eddie” I think this place would be full of pale bottoms.
Then the show started, and it was about some of my favorite things ever: science, the beginning of religion, religion in general, and history. It was FANTASTIC. I was laughing hysterically (in general I do not laugh at shows/movies/comedy). He talked about Wikipedia a lot, which both amused me (when he said that it’s so very often incorrect) and irritated me (I hate Wikipedia), which lead me to the following tweet that was on the screen during intermission:
@eddieizzard is hilarious; this show is making me v. happy. However, Wikipedia is still full of shit and should never be used as a reference
During the second half of the show, a woman in our row was exceedingly drunk, to the point that she was getting up and yelling. The guy in front of her tried to calm her down, so she started yelling at him, and since he couldn’t get out because he was in the middle of the row, I went and got some security — at which point she started throwing crap at me. It was… special. Anyway, the rest of the show was great, and I’m still on Cloud 9 that Brandon managed to pull that off. :)
We got out to the limo and out of the arena super quick, thus missing all the traffic, and got back to the hotel to find that they’d sprinkled rose petals on the bed. Hee.
I slept almost through the night for the first time since K was around 3 months old. It was surreal. (During dinner and the show, Kristin had been sms’ing us to tell us how things were going, and sent us a photo to show that K was surviving just fine — in fact, she hardly cried at all!) I did, however, forget my pump, which led to Unfortunate Results the next morning (ow). That was part of the impetus for us to get home before noon (also, I missed my beeb!). We ate our delicious pastries for breakfast and came home to giant hugs from a baby who apparently only woke up once (for an hour) for her caregivers. Andrew and Kristin had a harder time with the bed-hogging dogs than they did with Katie!
So, overall, my birthday surprise was AMAZING, as is my incredible husband. I do not expect a Valentine’s Day present. :D
