A V.I.D!*

* A Very Important Day, aka my birthday!!!!!

It is my birthday today - I have moved up an age group and I am now 45. I have in the last 2 days been out for the following meals:

Friday lunchtime with Strewth and Mr B at Bernadettes (a vegetarian restaurant) where we had really delicious pizzas and where I also managed to drop one slice down the side of my chair onto the ground. Hmmm, true to form and I hadn't even had a glass of wine at that stage - soon to be rectified however! The pizza was followed by a small slice of lemon & lime baked cheesecake. It was delicious!

Out to dinner at Antigos in Civic with friends from work - a girls' night out. It was raucous and lots of fun, the food was okay but the service was really really slow. I received a box of dark chocolate Lindt balls and Bodyshop nut butter from the girls - they know me so well ;-)!

Out for breakfast at da Cellinis this morning with Mr CJ where I had Bircher muesli with berry compote - yum. Mr CJ tucked into poached eggs, bacon and grilled tomatoes on toasted Italian bread. Naturally we had a cappuccino.

For lunch we met with Strewth and Mr B at Bayswiss where we had lunch and more coffee. They gave me some some great presents: a book called "The Last Book About Italy" by Ann Rickard, Bodyshop foot gel, foot cream, foot scrub, foot spray and feet fizzies (I'm assuming its because I'm clocking up the kilometres running and not because I have a problem with my feet that my friends won't tell me about!) and a very cool DVD. The DVD is called Coffee Crazy and its about the Australian 2004 World Champion Barista Paul Bassett's journey to find the world's best cup of coffee!What I'm particularly interested in is the section on The World's Worst Cup of Coffee!

Tonight we went down to Lake Burley Griffin to watch Skyfire 18 fireworks put on in honour of my birthday! (well okay a slight exaggeration!). We met up with friends of ours, Bec and Mat, who was also celebrating his birthday today.

So what other presents did I get? From good friend Bec I received the latest Jamie Oliver cookbook about Italy. From the family I received a small hot pink suitcase (matched my large hot pink suitcase), a very large box of chocolates and The Silver Spoon Italian cookbook. I am planning on becoming a domestic goddess in the cooking department - weekends only! Should be interesting!

Its been a lovely day but you know what? Thank goodness I have a scheduled run of 34km tomorrow because I'm going to need it to run off all the food I have eaten in
the last couple of days, including my birthday cake which was a pavlova. But its been a lot of fun!

Yesterday's session - easy run

Time / weather - 6am / very very cool
Distance - 12.1km
Time taken - 1hr 4.24min
Av pace - 5.19min/km
AHR - 146

It was very cool running down by the creek yesterday morning - the mist was swirling around and it was very easy to imagine swamp monsters emerging from the mists! However the closest I got to seeing swamp monsters were dogs being walked by their owners.

No problem with the run or the crop top, my shoes were in their rightful place and I remembered to take a key to let myself in after the run. This was to be my last run as a 44 year old.