Some years I’m excited about birthdays. Some years, not so much. Unfortunately this year falls into the latter category. There is no particular reason for my lack of excitement. I’m generally content with where I am at this point in my life. Considering that birthdays are generally the time when you reflect the most about your current situation, I would say that my situation has passed the Birthday Test.

For whatever reason, though, I have made every attempt to hide the fact that it is my birthday this year. I have hidden this information from my Facebook page, I’ve intentionally avoided any birthday-related activities, and, quite frankly, would love for this week to be over as quickly as possible.

There’s nothing wrong with getting older — it’s all clearly laid out in life’s rule book. For what its worth, we get older every day, it’s just that we just use one calendar day of the year to represent the point at which your age becomes age+1. But, again, I hide.

Being 31 wasn’t that exciting, but only the Great Sea of Life (N.S.) knows what I have in store during my thirty-third year of life which officially begins today. Perhaps this is the direction that I need to take.

Perhaps that’s the purpose of this writing… An opportunity for me to re-evaluate the perspective that I bring to birthdays. Rather than focusing on being another year older, I should instead celebrate the clean slate which I am now given to work with. Similar to the Jewish Holiday of Rosh Hashanah , this is my opportunity to start anew.. a fresh start. Celebrate endings and new beginnings.

Regardless, I don’t have the luxury to go into complete hiding this week — and chances are by the time next weekend rolls around, I’ll want to go out and party once again. So I’ll stop my complaining and just suck it up like I do any other week — this one just happens to have an annoying milestone in the middle of it.

I just found out, by googling myself, that I am quoted in an eHow article.

I know that my “How to become a runner” article has gotten a lot of attention on the web, but that’s pretty cool. I wish I could go running.

We’ve been taking a couple of weekend trips lately, and I thought I’d take a moment to post the pictures from the various weekends. The first was a trip out to Arnold, CA — which is about an hour south of Lake Tahoe, for a weekend with some friends. The second was an exciting weekend a few weeks back when we headed down to Monterey, CA for a day of Whale Watching and the Monterey Aquarium. Check out the photos.