Lift Up Your Hearts!

We celebrated my birthday with a three-way phone call (Florida/Pittsburgh/Basel), good wishes from family and friends, and a dinner at the Kobé Japanese Steakhouse.  We'd been to the Kobé before, but that was probably 15 years ago.  Their teppanyaki service doesn't remind me in the least of our experiences in Japan, but that doesn't mean the food wasn't good.  We didn't even spring for the $80 Wagyu beef; the $18 sirloin was quite delicious enough.  And the $15 birthday bribe was worth a bit of mild embarrassment.

Today was a bigger birthday, with a slightly bigger celebration.  For our part, we once again joined the Greater Geneva Grande Award Marching Band for Geneva, Florida's genuine, old-fashioned, small-town Independence Day celebration, the only Independence Day parade in Central Florida to occur on July 4th.  I love Geneva's celebration—I hope that it is not a bad sign that the cow-chip toss game used plastic "chips" this year—and I love the band even more.  It was 15 years ago that we first marched with some of those great folks!

As usual, I made loud crashing noises with cymbals, and Porter kept the band members well hydrated.  He's had that job ever since our first gig, Atlanta's Independence Day parade in 1993.  Geneva lacks the television coverage, the long parade route, the melting tar in the pavement under our feet, and the real, desperate need for frequent hydration—in Atlanta we were the only band not to have someone faint—but his efforts and antics are no less appreciated.

  

Geneva's Master of Ceremonies challenged us to take this patriotic quiz in today's Orlando Sentinel, claiming that he only missed two questions.  I was more than pleased that I missed none at all, though on one question I used my multiple-choice test taking skills more than my real knowledge.  (Porter, of course, easily got them all right.)  The pride was somewhat short-lived, however, since I found the full version of the test and only scored 90%. That would still be a respectable score if I did not have the nagging feeling that I've seen that test somewhere before, so it doesn't really count.

I hope you all had a great day, however you celebrated!