There is something peculiarly happy about listening to the Dixie Chicks' "There's Your Trouble." Maybe it's that this was the first Chicks song I ever heard. Or maybe it's just really good music. The nifty thing about the Chicks is that they have all sorts of cool instruments, and they play most all of them so they know how to use them, too.

So Rose's birthday was two days ago, and it was evidently a rousing success, which I am glad of. Other than providing the music (which wasn't even mine) I didn't have that much to do with it, so I won't give the complete blog-down to those of you who don't know where to get that yourselves. Still, I'm glad that she had a good birthday.

It's kind of amazing to me how far Rose and I have come since I started this as a way to let people see the parts of me that don't get much play at Stanford. If you check back in the archives, you can get an idea of just how far. I can still remember buying that blue glass rose with Shanah at Knott's, thinking it was the perfect gift to express how special she was to me and trying not to think about the all-too-real prospect that by the time I saw her to give it to her it would all be over. As it turns out that's exactly what happened, but I'm still glad that I got to give it to her. Even if my first uses of the Blue Rose blogname were irresponsible and immature.

The subject of my blog will have to do as a segue into what I actually intended to write about tonight: namely, fantasizing about my birthday surprise. One of the nifty things about Rose's birthday was that it brought together people from all different areas of her social existence. True, those disparate areas didn't mix very much, and there was maybe even some social tension - but she liked it, and after all it was her birthday. Now, I'm not saying that my friends could arrange for the guys to get up here, and I'm certainly not expecting anybody to try. But it would be awfully cool. I think the agenda for my ideal Stanford birthday would go something like this:

1). Play video games with guys (a little AvP action, a little Jedi Knight II, if only to show them how cool that lightsaber is). Maybe have some Smashing time.
2). Dinner out with the guys, to talk about nerdy gaming stuff.
3). Phoenix Earth session.
4). Dinner out with Shanah and Rose.
5). Movie with lots of people. Either something artsy (Moulin Rouge? Chicago?), cool (Alien Resurrection? Predator 2? Starship Troopers?), wistful (Beauty and the Beast? Tarzan?), or horrible (Dungeons & Dragons?).
6). Dancing with lots of people, including but not necessarily limited to the Ailouriskai and Alanna and Lady and Rose and Shanah and Chariessa.
7). Worship.
8). Storytime, either with something symbolically significant (Enchanted Forest? Song of the Lioness?) or that I can read really well (James and the Giant Peach?)
9). Family time, possibly combined with storytime.

Of course that's not a very practical plan, seeing as how it involves two dinners, the presence of the entire Phoenix Earth party, a Phoenix Earth session (which would require me to have a session planned in advance and would take about six hours out of the day), and a movie (which would take a minimum of ninety minutes). And not everybody on the guest list implied above would be comfortable with a worship set. And of course as much as I like dancing with Lady she'd probably feel kind of odd coming to a birthday party for me, depending on the guest list. But hey, a guy can dream.