birfday weekend

Ahoy,

I noticed late in life that my brother's and my birthdays fall on each other's half birthdays. Not like I ever needed an excuse to plan his birthday parties and invite my friends. This year, my mom, cousin A, and I drove to visit him in Madison for an early birthday celebration. His 23rd birthday! After 21, the numbers all mush together probably until your quarter century, but any year he survives as my brother is something to be impressed with.

My mission to drag my kid cousin along was looking questionable at first, but anytime you pull the "scaredy-cat" threat on a 10 year old guarantees a fast track to "Yes, I'll do it!" So that's how we ended up kidnapping my cousin to go on a 3.5 hour car ride to Madison and ditching his science group (for probably what is his final project). But having 2 college degrees under my belt, 4th grade doesn't really seem like a very important blip on an educational record.

We spent Saturday at the zoo and arboretum in Madison. After having been to a $1 zoo in Croatia, all other zoos seem like paradise in comparison. I'm sure there are all sorts of obscenities happening behind the scenes at zoos and captive life in general, but I don't feel like now is the appropriate time to impart such a degree of skepticism in his young eyes. We kept our eyes peeled for animals on the move, roaring tigers, and things to climb on. Though I'm beyond the appropriate age to be acting like a child, I'll still take any excuse to act like a child. K and I probably behaved more like a 10 year olds than A did.

On Sunday, in our typical spur of the moment (read: chronically indecisive) fashion made it to the Verona town parade. Verona, being an excruciatingly small town, pulled everyone out of their house for this event. There are probably fewer residents than students in our CPS high school. Half the town was probably in the parade, and the other half was watching. But this event was a great excuse to give out free promotional wares to people you know already (this place is probably so small that everybody knows everybody) and throw out candy by the gallon to every child. Even the dentist was giving out candy. I'm pretty sure you can get more candy here than from a full night of trick-or-treating.

We made another tour of the Epic campus, which is always fun for me. And shared some ice cream cake and sparkling juice with my brother to top off his most low-key birthday yet, although I'm sure he would have liked more video games. I guess all the hubbub on his birthday was always more my doing and his ability to not fight me on it (read: ignore me).

yay for brothers,
jt