Everyone I know was Born in February

Well, almost.

My roommate and I take [our] birthdays pretty seriously and we like to extend our celebrations over the course of the surrounding days, like Mardi Gras. With his 22nd birthday coming up on Tuesday, some friends and I got together last night to celebrate and we went to a restaurant in Central Square called Green Street, where everything from the hazelnut and honey-stuffed sardines to the bacon cheeseburger and our manhattans were all-encompassingly satisfying. Really, it was the kind of food that left all of us happily sighing and leaning comfortably against the back of our chairs as if we'd just done something extraordinary, like build a barn, not simply devour an exquisite meal. Best of all, the wait staff let us take our time eating and laughing and (in my case) changing from my heels to flats at the booth even though the restaurant was packed with couples celebrating an early Valentine's Day. Already I'm looking forward to my next visit to Green Street- and I don't even like eating meals.

Last year, my roommate (who's a twin) was sent this giant banner to commemorate the big day from his father, who insisted we hang it in the kitchen. Sadly, this year we are sans banner.

The evening took a strange twist, however, when dinner was punctuated by a series of text messages from my parents, who are going through some mysterious middle-aged moment of wanderlust. Like the couples at our neighboring tables, they too chose to celebrate Valentine's Day early and did so by visiting the Minneapolis Convention Center to check out the RV show.

I cannot stress how weird this is- like, my parents abhor camping; though they aren't by any means flagrantly extravagant, they are not prone to roughing it and generally don't associate with the kind of people that come to mind when thinking of an RV park (which, in my RV novice imagination include people who want to smoke inside, people who want to bring their numerous children on vacation, people who want to bring their [giant, shedding] dog, cat, or parrot on vacation, and people who never want to not be on vacation).

What began as a conversation that went something like, "Haha, wouldn't it be funny if your mother and I bought an RV and traveled the country? Ha..." suddenly morphed into a hurried text message declaring "We bought a Mercedes Benz, Great Western RV. I am shocked that your mother came around to my thinking on this. We are going to have some fun now!" accompanied by a grainy cell phone picture of this baby:

And to sweeten the deal, they're going to blog about their cross-country journey for the RV dealer's website. OH, MY GOSH.

Life sure has an unsettling way of getting weirder as we get older and my roommate and I will be sure to toast to this weirdness as we continue celebrating his miraculous birth. HAPPY SUNDAY!

Oh, and HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!