It’s been a great birthday week so far: a nice dinner with Michael, Ali, Janet, Eric, and Chris at Doughboys on 3rd (though if their Hollywood location, half a mile from our house, would go ahead and open any day now, that would be great; the website says ‘coming Summer 2006’?), and a bunch of nice gifts from Aimee and the family. We head to Las Vegas tomorrow for a fun weekend of flying wine stewards, my first Cirque du Soleil experience, and hopefully some luck at the tables. I picked up the new Sondre Lerche album today, which is terrific, and we’re looking forward to seeing him (sandwiched between Bloc Party the night before and Badly Drawn Boy the night after) in March when he comes to town. Why it has to be the El Rey instead of the Troubadour like last time, I don’t know. The price of fame, I suppose. The only blemish on the week came when we tried to watch the penultimate episode of (the borrowed box set of ) the first season of ‘The Wire’? last night: as I pulled the DVD off of its little plastic snap housing, it cracked right across the radius. We went from the immediate gratification of an entire season of television at our fingertips to not being able to see the conclusion for at least two weeks as the replacement box set is shipped, in one second flat. So now we’ll have our own sort of useless box of the season with a burned copy of the last two episodes, if anyone wants to borrow it. It’s good stuff – just don’t get too excited when you pull it out of the case.