Now THAT’S What I Call a B’Day!!!

Calling all Beyonce Stans… If you are of the male persuasion with grand aspirations of wooing the Queen of Pop(tarts) away from her man, he has thrown down the gauntlet and now the ball is in your court.

Having celebrated her 29^th birthday this weekend, Bey was gifted with (hold on to your platinum, waist-length weaves ladies)…an island!!!!  Shelling out a cool $20 Million, The Jigga Man added a picturesque 12.5 acre island just off The Florida Keys to his wife’s portfolio.

I swear, it’s like a calculated game of 21st Century Monopoly between these two; I can’t wait to see how she plans to upgrade him on his birthday.  What do you want to wager that she’ll probably buy him the Eastern-most part of The Moon with a Lunar Condo to boot?

Throwing Confetti: Happy Birthday Barry!

Happy 49^th Birthday to President Barack Obama….

Barry,

Here’s hoping that you enjoy this day of your birth (which I wholeheartedly believe, occurred in the beautiful state of Hawaii; as did mine incidentally…Fanny Pack Fact #278),

May you celebrate with laughter, love, friends, family and funtabulousness (see: The 2010 Sarah Palin Fictionary, 2^nd Edition for exact definition)!

Sincerly,

~Tiff

Click here to sign President Obama’s Birthday Card!

The Thirty & UP Crowd

I’ve chosen to dedicate today’s blog post to my friend Dee. She gets this acknowledgment, not because of her big sister-friend advice and tell-it-like-it-is insight (though she has all that at the ready for my consumption whenever I need it), but instead because she refuses to acknowledge the fact that I’ve chosen to maintain my “twenties” status for the rest of my life.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, Dee refuses to accept that I refuse to accept (stay with me here) being thirty-something. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with being older. I look forward to aging gracefully and living to a ripe old (mature) age, I just intend to remain in my twenties while I do it. Impossible, you say? Well, I beg to differ. Case and point, as of yesterday, I turned “twenty-ten” years old; ten years from now, I’ll be twenty-twenty. When my kids put me in a “home”, I’ll be twenty-seventy…see how that works? 

To my way of thinking, this is a completely logical age progression strategy. To Dee, not so much. She believes that I’m SO delusional that she felt it only proper to remind me of the subtle differences between the over thirty crowd in comparison to this young microwave generation that we see before us today.

Check out the email that she sent me this morning:
 
If you are 30, or older, you might think this is hilarious!       

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning…Uphill…Barefoot…BOTH ways… yadda, yadda, yadda! And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was NO WAY I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it!       

But now that I am over the ripe old age of thirty, I can’t help but to look around and notice the youth of today: You’ve got it so easy!  I      mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a dang Utopia! And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don’t know how good you’ve got it!       

I mean, when I was a kid we didn’t have the Internet.  If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library and look it up ourselves; in the card catalog!! There was no email!!  We had to actually write somebody a freaking letter – with a pen! Then we had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, and it would take like a week to get there! Plus, stamps were 10 cents!       

Oh, and Child Protective Services didn’t care if our parents beat us.  As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to whoop my tail! Nowhere was safe! 

Also, there were no MP3′s or Napsters or iTunes!  If we wanted to steal music, we had to hitch hike to the record store and shoplift it! Or we had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and even then, the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and jack it all up! There were no CD players!  We had tape decks in our car.  We’d play our favorite tape and “eject” it when finished, and then the tape would come undone, rendering it useless.  Cause, hey, that’s how we rolled, baby!  Dig?       

We didn’t have fancy crap like Call Waiting!  If we were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal, that’s it!  There weren’t any freakin’ cell phones either. If we left the house, we just didn’t make a darn call or receive one. We actually had to be out of touch with our “friends”. OH MY GOD !!!  Think of the horror…not being in touch with someone 24/7!!!  And then there’s TEXTING. Yeah right. Please!  You kids have no idea how annoying you are. And we didn’t have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, we had no idea who it was!  It could be our school, our parents, our boss, our bookie, the collection agent… We just didn’t know!!! We had to pick it up and take our chances, mister!       

Hmm, what else? Oh, we didn’t have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like ‘Space Invaders’ and ‘Asteroids’.  The screen guy wasn’t even a “guy” but a little square!  We actually had to use our imagination!!!  And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen… Forever! And we could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until we died; Just like LIFE!     

For scheduling, we had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! We were screwed when it came to channel surfing! We had to get off your tails and walk over to the TV to change the channel!!!  NO REMOTES!!! Oh, no, what’s the world coming to?!?!     

There was no Cartoon Network either! We could only get cartoons  on Saturday Morning.  Do you hear what I’m saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-finks! And we didn’t have microwaves.  If we wanted to heat something  up, we had to use the stove!  Imagine that! 

AND our parents told us to stay outside and play… All. Day. Long. Oh no, no electronics to soothe and comfort.  And if we came back inside…we were doing chores! And car seats – oh, please!   Mom threw us in the back seat and we hung on for dear life.  If we were lucky, we got the “safety arm” across the chest at the last moment if she had to stop suddenly, and if our head hit the dashboard, well that was just our fault for calling “shot gun” in the first place!

See!  That’s exactly what I’m talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You’re spoiled rotten!  You guys wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 1980 or any time before!     

Regards,       
Dee, of The Over 30 Crowd

Yeah yeah, I’ll admit it; all of that WAS true! Clearly, this is Dee’s subtle way of telling me to embrace thirty, short of hitting me in the face with a piece of my birthday cake, huh?

Okay Dee, I get it: “I am thirty, hear me roar!”

Happy Born-Day To Me!

On this date, some three decades ago on the tropical island of Oahu, yours truly sprang forth full of life, exuberance and two lungs full of hot air.  Not a lot has changed since those many years ago, huh?

 My outspoken bravado notwithstanding, please excuse me for the remainder of this day, while I forgo the customary Fanny Pack blog post to instead celebrate another wonderful year of being blessed with life, family, friends and OF COURSE the gift of wordsmithery (yes, that’s right…and no, don’t bother looking it up, it’s got my trademark).

So, in honor of this special day, let’s all take a commemorative picture walk through a few of my “life and times” moments.  The way I see it, today marks another fabulous year, another fabulous outlook on life.  I’m alive and well when many people weren’t granted the opportunity to continue this walk.  The fragility of life has never been lost on me, and being given another day to try to “get it right” keeps me humbled and grateful.

With this in mind, I will always celebrate my special day with all the extra-ness I can muster…and what could possibly be more EXTRA than a Yo Gabba Gabba birthday serenade from the Ting Tings (you can thank my two-year old for my addiction to this show)?

*Woooo Hooo*  Happy Born-Day To Me! *Throws Confetti*

~Tiff