Birthday gratitude

Thank you, everyone, particularly Facebook friends, for all the birthday well wishes! Thanks to Facebook, I now get birthday wishes from cousins, sixth grade classmates, old friends and new.  It was a surprisingly good birthday, considering the circumstances of being away from J.  He did, however, give me an awesome and much desired gift: a Kindle!

Anyone who knows me even a little knows that I love books.  I was one of those 'I prefer paper books' holdouts until just recently discovering the pleasure of e-books. Don't get me wrong, I still love books in any format, but e-books are just another way to enjoy them.  My Kindle, so thin and light and fast, is not only a fun gadget, but it allows me to carry hundreds of books around with me wherever I go.  For any book lover who has moved and carried box after box of heavy books up flights of stairs, you can appreciate the pleasure of carrying around multiple weightless volumes.

While I've loaded many of the no cost classics on my e-reader, just last night I bought a new novel for my Kindle.  It's a romance (not surprisingly), but with a twist.  This one falls into the currently hot sub-genre of Steampunk. It's a genre that melds historical settings (usually the Victorian era) with retro-futuristic technological innovations.  The author, Meljean Brook, is a member of my local writing group and I interviewed her recently for my Romance Novel Examiner page.  You can link to that article here.

Psychologically, this birthday has been daunting. There is something unnerving about having the big 4 0 staring you in the face.  However, the driven side of me just insists that I have much to accomplish in the next year so that I will feel satisfied rather than regretful when the next October 28 rolls around.

I'm grateful for friends (particularly the one who met me for dinner and writing collaboration tonight so that I wouldn't be alone on my birthday - thanks, Jon) and family.  Thank you for making it an excellent 39th birthday.