Happy Birthday, Hubby.

Yesterday was Hubby’s birthday.  His 40th.  Kind of a big deal, right?

Not so much, according to him.  In the weeks leading up to it, every time I asked what he wanted to do for his big day, I got the same answer: “Nothing.”  So we did.  Mostly.

It ended up being a nice evening, and since we had no plans, we also had no expectations.

He wanted to go to a bookstore for a fantasy football magazine.  Yes, he’s one of those.  Once football season officially starts, I will lose my husband, for the next 17 weeks, to stats, players, drafts, waivers, and points.  He will not care so much about the game on TV as the individual players–his own and the other guy’s.  Forget team loyalty.  If the other guy has his favorite team’s kicker, he wants him to choke at every opportunity.  Wide right.  Whatever.

Anyway.  On our way to the bookstore, I pointed out a bakery where we could possibly pick up a piece or two of cake, into which I would stick a candle for him to blow out.  I might even sing.  Much to our delight, turns out we had actually stumbled upon our city’s version of Panera!  I’ve been bummed out for years that we don’t have one around here.  Lo and behold! it’s been right under our noses (for at least a few months) with a different name, and had I planned ahead for a birthday cake for my husband, we would have missed it, maybe forever.

So, dinner and cake?  Check.  Fantasy football cheat sheet?  Done.  We then headed home to enjoy a game of Playing Gods, a board game I bought Hubby for his birthday last year and which, until last night, had been sitting on top of the bookshelf untouched for a year.

I may have mentioned that Hubby’s an atheist?  So I had gotten him this game, at his request, which takes a rather irreverent and light-hearted view of religion.  And by “irreverent and light-hearted,” I mean that a certain belief system is represented by a large, chubby Buddha wielding an enormous machine gun.  Awesome.  Each “god” in the game gets to torment the others’ sects with plagues and natural disasters or try to woo them with the promise of prosperity or an afterlife, with the ultimate goal of either spreading said deity’s religion over at least half the globe, or killing off all other gods.  Hubby read all the rules thoroughly, and we proceeded to play not one, but two games, both of which he won rather easily.  It was his birthday, after all.

(Okay, that has nothing to do with it.  I didn’t let him win, and in fact was quite competitive.  But rather than admit defeat, it sounds so much better to say I was going easy on him as the birthday boy.)

And that was pretty much it.  He watched a little more of the Ken Burns Baseball documentary while I read a few blogs, and then I went to bed.  Pretty low-key, but that’s just how we roll.