Birthdays, Mustachey Kittens and Bourbon Street at 7am

It's my birthday today. I turned 23, and while I realize that Next Year Me and every Me that has a birthday after that will hate 23 year old me for saying, I feel just a touch like this is the beginning of the end.

I think that actually 22 was probably the beginning of the end, but this time last year I'd only been back in the country for less than two days and I was too jetlagged and New York-Hung Over to care much.

This year I just got up at 5:45am, left the boyfriend asleep because he was working a night shift tonight and needed to sleep in, and went to work :S

 Mustachey kitten from Apartment Therapy. If ever get another teeny kitteny thing to be friends with Wayne, it will definitely be a mustachey kitten. Maybe called Nigel. Nigel and Wayne.

But the girlies (and charming accented gentlemen) decorated my computer screen and my desk with balloons and ribbon and a Happy Birthday banner for when I arrived. And they made a little fuss with carrot cake and sparklers. Which is insanely lovely, because they've barely known me a month. They're darlings. All of them.

This teeny birdy is from one of my favoritest blogs. Mackin Ink is written by a very charming American woman with three twinkly daughters, who bounces around the world with them and her hubby, and writes very beautiful words. Read her, she's lovely

My lovely boy had a cake waiting for me last night, and has issued me an IOU for a little iPad and attatchy keyboard or Microsoft Surfacey clicky thing before I go back to school, so I can take lecture notes all stylish-like and don't have to trek my jumbo pink laptop back and forth. So exciting. I want to do the clicky dance from the Microsoft ad. Such a sucker for musical advertising.

Bourbon Street, New Orleans, the morning after. Most tourists don't see it, but  at about 6am street sweepers come down Bourbon Street, scoop up all the rubbish and beads, and then spray lemon scented hospital grade disinfectant all over the streets. So Bourbon Street at 4am smells like beer and puke and smoke. By 7am it smells lemony fresh.

And I have a work Christmas Party at a restaurant on the water in Brighton Le Sands on Friday, and a lovely brunch and shopping day planned with my awesome mother, Kate.

It's no Bourbon Street night out, but birthday loveliest has definitely taken the edge off having to grow up. Maybe next year I'll be around to walk through lemony fresh Bourbon Street in the morning for beignets and lattes.

Typical Wednesday. What of it?