Mah Birfdey Celebrayshuns 2009

Because my little brother's graduation fell on my birthday this year, I decided to celebrate a day earlier, using an itinerary remarkably similar to last year's birthday.

My bestie Shaz and I headed out to McMenamin's Edgefield early on Friday morning for spa treatments at Ruby's. The main reason for making the trek a million miles to Edgefield is because of the singular awesomeness of the soaking pool - a soaking pool that is only available to hotel and spa guests.

Following our lovely treatments and before we kicked it in the badass pool...


...we headed over to the Loading Dock Pub by way of the flower garden, where I saw the cutest lil' hummingbird!

At the Loading Dock, Shaz and I had a fantabulous lunch complete with tasty pints of beer (beer! for lunch! on a weekday!) and I had a field day making snarky commentary both in person and on Twitter about this chick and her Kanye West sunglasses. I mean, WTF? Is she from the future?

After lunch we headed back to Ruby's Spa and the soaking pool. But not before I snagged a few sippy containers of Shiraz out of Shaz's trunk. We proceeded to soak up the sun in the lovely salt water of the pool whilst toasting to my birthday, friendship and summer with our wine-filled plastic cups. It was pretty much a magical afternoon.

Once we'd had our fill of soakin', Shaz dropped me off at my sister's house and Faith and I headed out for pedicures at her regular joint. I have to believe that the wine had a lot to do with my reaction once we were seated in the pedi chairs. Because the thing is? I'm pretty sure that pedi massage chair got to third base on my shiz. I felt mildly assaulted, really. There was a whole lot of deep muscle tushie massage that I've never experienced in a nail salon before. And I couldn't help but laugh hysterically. Faith had no idea what was wrong with me.

Once I enjoyed a post-encounter cigarette (I keed, I keed - no smokin' for this girl right here) we rolled back to Faith's place, collected our menfolk and went to dinner at Laurelhurst Market.

Laurelhurst Market had been a convenience store all during the time Faith, her husband Alex and I had grown up in Portland, but it recently reopened as a butcher shop/dining establishment. All four of us got down on some serious steak action and they were all delicious, save for Jay's smoked tri-tip, which was not good. Like, at all. We shared bits of our steak with him, so combined with the sides (so good!), he managed just fine.

Alex and the nephew take a quick five after consuming their dinners (Steak Frites for Alex, bottled formula for the nephew)

All in all, it was a damn good birthday celebration, not the least of which was due to the arrival of my favorite birthday gift this year - the WTF? stamp given to me by one of the Portland Based Girl Gang chicks, Miss Dee. She asked that I not abuse the stamp through overuse at work, but that's just a promise I can't keep...