Tomorrow is my birthday.  While I’m starting to deal with my normal paranoia of getting old, I also cannot stop thinking about what a crazy year it’s been since my last birthday.

On December 9, 2007, I was recovering from the birthday party that Mike had thrown for me the day before- complete with the Dora the Explorer paper decorations he had bought and about 30 of our closest friends crammed into our little apartment in Irvine.  We had just found out that the offer we put down on our house in Anaheim had been turned down.  Mike’s left leg was still a little swollen from his accident during our honeymoon.  Every wall in our home was white.  I saw Mike’s mom at work every day.  Jimmy lived with his parents.  Elizabeth Ng had just gotten engaged to a boy she was kind of dating at our wedding six months earlier.  There was a giant unspoken weirdness between Amy and I but we pretended everything was fine.  Elizabeth Carter was knee deep in nursing school.  Most of Mike’s friends- Ben, Derek, Justin and An- were still deep in the midst of their undergrad.  Mary had just moved back to LA and we were ecstatic that we lived in the same state again.  I had never played Rock Band before.  Derrick was the youngest person in his family.  I had never broken a bone.  Mike would proudly tell people that he never wanted to leave Orange County.

And then the year happened.  That house that our offer got rejected on- we bought it.  And we spent a month remodeling it with the help of our amazing friends and family.  We went from living in the most sterile apartment ever in Irvine to a house in Anaheim with a green living room, a blue kitchen and an orange craft room.  We finished it just in time to host Elizabeth and John’s engagement party, complete with a quesadilla bar, and in May we went to their wedding.  I hung out with Mary every week.  Elizabeth Carter, Justin and Ben graduated, and An and Derek(!) will be done with school in a matter of weeks.  Derrick is an uncle!  Amy and I had a huge fight but then made up and are actually close again.  We hosted barbeques, open houses and birthday parties in our fancy new backyard.  Rock Band was played in our house so often that we somehow ended up with a mike stand.  I completed a triathalon.  I then fell off my bike, broke my wrist, had surgery on it and walked around with a big piece of metal sticking out of my arm for 6 weeks.  Then I had the piece of metal unscrewed while I watched.

And then, of course, Mike got a job offer at Microsoft and we moved to Seattle.  I quit my comfy job at the surgery center, we watched our stuff get packed and we said good-bye to our friends and family.  We were worried that buying the house had been a huge mistake, but when Derek, Justin, Jimmy and Ben moved in, we realized that everything was going to work out.  (Thanks again- you guys are the best tenants ever!)  Mike sold the Rav4, bought the Audi and then sold the Audi.  We found an amazing apartment in the best neighborhood ever in Seattle and lived there with no furniture or internet during our first week in Seattle.  Justin came up to visit us and I spent an entire week trying to entertain him, and in the process he became “our friend” instead of just “Mike’s friend.”  Amy and Derek came and visited us and took us to our first show in Seattle.  I went from thinking public transportation was disgusting to using it every day to get to work (I do still sometimes think it’s disgusting though.)  We started to make new friends and I found the best knitting group in the whole wide world.  I found somebody who runs with me (so we’ve flaked a bit the last two weeks, this Sunday it’s ON) and doesn’t complain when I lag behind.  Mike made a friend up here who may possibly know even more about cars than he does.  We have a group of people that we go out to dinner with regularly.  We’ve started thinking about looking at some investment property up here.

In short, this year has been absolutely, totally unexpectedly, crazy nutso random.   I never would have thought that any of this was going to happen, but I’m glad it did.  This year has been an adventure.  When people ask me how long I think we’ll be in Seattle, I tell them that I honestly have no idea.  I’m over making long-term plans for now.  I’m ready to just sit back and see what’s going to happen.