"It's my birthday!!!"

... said the blog.

That's right, ol' buddy, ol' pal, ol' readers of mine. It's this blog's first birthday. This means that I am entitled to type about how I and my blog-self have changed in the past year.

But that's not gonna happen.

Instead, I'm going to babble some more. Stick with me while you can; it usually gets funniest about two-thirds of the way through.

So, babbling onward. Now I'm on the spot, though, so it's actually harder to babble, you see. I mean, look, I'm babbling about babbling right now, and that's not funny in the least.

Things in my line of sight worth babbling about: Uncle Buck. God's gift to movies made in the late 90's. On DVD for $5 at Target, I am honored to own this movie. I just watched it, in fact. It is full of awkward, apparently-only-PG hilarity, and also giant pancakes. Oh, the giant pancakes! I want them so much. Do ya feel me, people who are physically near me on the date of my birth? I would love giant pancakes on my birthday.

Other things in my line of sight: all the artwork from MCM (that's Minnesota Children's Museum) that I never got around to wallpapering my room with. Fingerpainting, a bit of circle drawing, and a general boat-ton of truck-painting. Yeah, you read that right: truck painting. Painting with trucks, and other assorted vehicles. Lots of tire track patterns and stuff like that, but mostly awesome splattering when you find one of those self-propelling cars (you know, the ones where you pull 'em backwards, and then they're off), drag it backwards through the paint, hold the wheels still as you position it over your paper, then hope you remembered your apron as you let 'er rip.

This is how I spent my summer. I took children's painting activities, deconstructed them a bit, and usually ended up with fingerpainting, now that I think about it a bit more. All the colors were supposed to be red-themed for Clifford the Big Red Dog (you know who I'm talking about), but eventually there just wasn't enough red/pink/white to go around, so we added yellow and orange, and finally blue. So, I would mix the colors I didn't have, searching for just the right hues of brown and green to go with my current paint-flinging project. Then, I'd let a kid use my hue, and it would all go to hell, 'cause he'd mix too much yellow in there or something. His project was cooler than mine in the end, though, so I didn't really care.

Those kids were awesome painters, fo' real. And this is a museum, not a summer camp, so there were different kids there everyday. (I was there for a week at a time.) Every day, when I went to the Curiosity Center (where the paint lives, keep up!) to set up all the paint and paper and stuffs, I'd have to get rid of all the projects left on the drying racks that no one came back to get at the end of their visit. Only I wouldn't get rid of them all. Instead, I would look through them, find the particularly amazing ones, and keep 'em for myself. By the end of the summer, in combination with my own paint creations, I had about 5 plastic bags full of painting. But they're all awesomely unique, so I couldn't throw them out, like my mom would have preferred. So I brought them to college. Where they sit next to my bed, waiting for me to get into the creatively motivated hub of procrastination, waiting to get collaged in a manner that befits them.

Umm, I'm done babbling now. Sickness makes me sleepy. I talked about MCM and painting, and just talking about those is as good as a virtual birthday party. And this is a blog-birthday, so a virtual party is exactly what's called for. Feel free to go find yourself some virtual cake and ice cream, or whatever other virtual birthday treats you prefer. I recommend looking here.