Birthday celebration

My major goal for my birthday for the past several years is to see JM in concert. Because he's not touring this summer for the first time since I began following him in 2002, I had to come up with an alternative. Luckily, Bruce Springsteen is touring, and he was performing at a venue in upstate New York. It also happened to be a venue that I have gone to before to see JM when he performed on my b-day three years ago (and last year, but I didn't go), so it seemed like a natural choice.


Because I've been taking tons of time off lately, I was kind of afraid to ask for the day off. But I was able to finagel it so that I could leave early and come in late the next day, but that meant that we got to the venue about 20 minutes before the show started and therefore had crappy seats. Did I say seats? We didn't have seats, we had lawn seats, which translated into standing on someone else's blanket for the whole show. I decided to live up to the pushy New Yorker reputation and just squeezed my way in between people until we had a tiny view of the stage, but more importantly, could actually hear the music. It was a good show, of course, but didn't really live up to the last show at Continental Arena back in May.

here's the setlist:

No Surrender
Badlands
Radio Nowhere
Outlaw Pete
Spirit In The Night
Working On A Dream
Rendezvous
Atlantic City
Johnny 99
Summertime Blues
Two Hearts
Surprise Surprise *
Because The Night
Waiting On A Sunny Day
The Promised Land
Racing In The Streets
Lonesome Day
The Rising
Born To Run
Rosalita
Girls In Their Summer Clothes
Thunder Road
American Land
Bobby Jean
Dancing In The Dark
Hungry Heart


*Surprise Surprise is a birthday song that someone requested. I pretended it was me.


I guess because people know me (or pay attention to things I write on my blog), everyone asked me if I was getting a cupcake. We were so rushed for time, I didn't, believe it or not. But it was a great day, nonetheless.

The next day, Heidi took me to dinner so we tried a new place called Permanent Brunch that just serves yummy breakfast food and another place Momofuku Milk Bar that I've been wanting to try for months but figured I needed a special occasion to eat something called "Crack Pie." I thought since this was my chance to have some birthday cake, I should get the Dulce de Leche cake, but I just couldn't pass up the pie. I can eat cake or cupcakes any day, and for my birthday, I eat pie.


So, here it is:














And here is the compost cookie, which has pretzels, potato chips, coffee, oats, butterscotch, and
chocolate chips:
















All delish!