Jen's Birthday!

Hughston awoke at 5:30am on June 21, 2008. He was about as welcome as Japanese bombers in Pearl Harbor. Is it too soon to make jokes about Pearl Harbor? If so, pretend I wrote "He was about as welcome as something that is totally unwelcome." Everyone still cool? Good.

It being Jennifer's birthday, I was duty-bound to wake up with the kids and let Jen sleep in. Disadvantage - I was tired. Advantage - I got to see what was left of the sunrise. Here is a picture.



The kids ate breakfast in the breakfast nook. It was our traditional vacation breakfast of the variety pack of cereals. Fruit Loops was very popular.


After Jen (finally) woke up, we managed to walk down to the seawall. Shelton and Hughston ran around like they had spent 13 hours cooped up in planes, cars and airports the previous day. Some people don't appreciate the glamor of international travel.


Down on the water, they have these seaplanes that do little tours of the city from the sky. We didn't do that, but we decided to get a coolness rub from the plane by taking this picture. Also, you'll notice I'm not in any pictures. Way to notice, noticer. Also, sometimes I talk about pictures before the picture and sometimes after the picture. I like to keep the readers on their toes. Are there any readers? I know Jennifer is a big fan.

We had a nanny come over starting at 2:00pm so that Jen and I could celebrate her birthday without the two tiny distractions. I call her a nanny because she was WAY too expensive to be a babysitter, and calling her a nanny brings this Mary Poppins thing to mind and who could possibly complain about Mary Poppins' price per hour? Anyway, she was from Australia and seemed not to mind that Shelton can talk for nine hours without pausing. The kids really liked her.

Jen and I decided to go to a concert in Stanley Park. The headliner was Stars, a Montreal Band. They have quality posters, as seen below.

The opening act was NAME REDACTED (the act's name isn't NAME REDACTED, but Jen made me take his name out for reasons I still don't understand, but I think Jen believes that he reads this blog). While he certainly made a fine effort to entertain by dancing around and talking about how happy he was to be there, well, his music is simply horrible. He rhymes "TKO" with "Broken Nose" and "Tokyo." Also, he has a song that's about being a HOMO SAPIEN, with flesh and feelings and not a robot with steel and transistors. Then he says that he has a golden heart, which completely kills the whole analogy. Anyway, if you were there, you'd know how terrible he was. He also kept calling the headliners "The Stars," leading pedantic music snobs to grumble that DUDE IT'S JUST "STARS."

I didn't grumble loud.

Stars were incredible. Just simply amazing. Their songs really lend themselves to live performance. So, here's a brief video of them performing a part of "Set Yourself on Fire."



You can see some flowers in the background. During the show, the band would grab flowers and throw them into the audience. Jen loved this, and loved it even more when I caught the last one the lead singer threw and gave it to her. You know, for her birthday.

The Porto-Potties at the concert were cleaner than our bathroom in Roswell and smelled like a sunny pine forest. Only in Canada could this even be conceivable.

Jen said it was her best birthday ever. Played with the kids in the morning, heard an awesome band at night. Who am I to argue?