No, I didn't spend last week passed out in a gutter somewhere as the aftermath of birthday festivities. (I wish!) Rather, the lack of updates here has been primarily caused by the amount of school work I have had recently.

No, really.

Though I went out both Wednesday and Thursday last week, I was awake by 10am each of the following mornings ready (if not exactly willing) to work on school stuff. (I took the second half of last week off from work.) That's right. I went out (at night! to bars! with friends! to celebrate my birthday!) and each morning after got up BEFORE NOON to do HOMEWORK.

Sad, I know.

But on to the good things: the birthday. The birthday was awesome. Thanks to some travel plans I have in the works for the near future (New York, here I come) the actual birthday events were pretty low key, but fabulous nonetheless. There were 3 birthday dinners, 2 birthday nights out drinking (double digit shots, people), and 5 (FIVE!) birthday cakes.

And the gifts? I made out like a bandit. Perhaps the two best things that I recieved were the tickets for a 5-day cruise and an 18 year old. (Yes, these people? These people that give me things? They know me well.)

I also received a wonderful surprise just in time for my birthday, while doing homework, of all things. For my genealogical research class I discovered a bunch of records for relatives on my mother's side, with a family name of Labusky. They came from a historical geographical area known as Bukovina, and it appears that the family name was originally Lebowski.

LEBOWSKI. MY ANCESTORS. L-E-B-O-W-S-K-I.

I am not even kidding when I say that I just about wept tears of joy when I discovered this. To say that I dove into my research with renewed vigor doesn't even touch the manic pace at which I hunted down records for this ancestral family that I now love more than my present one.

(During my research I uncovered an accident report from a railroad company in Washington State that noted the date -July 19, MY BIRTHDAY- when my great-great grandfather was CRUSHED when a tunnel collapsed. The person who transcribed the entry from the accident report to the web site noted that while the incident was marked an injury, it sounded like a fatality. But it wasn't. Pete Labusky, age 50 at the time of the accident, went on to live into his 80s. Tough motherfuckers, my family.)

So it turns out that while I can't focus on school work for the sake of getting a good education, throw in a family name that is tied to my favorite movie? Hell, I'm a star student material now, WATCH ME GO.

Everyone that called, commented, or wrote in to send birthday wishes: thank you. As a person with a horrible memory and a knack for losing touch with people quite easily, your thoughts meant a lot.

And no, I don't know why the scrollbars are all fucked up. And no, I don't plan on fixing this anytime soon.