Jen's Birthday with the Rockettes

When I asked Jen what she wanted to do on her birthday (since we both had the day off), she talked about a few things, but the one thing that kept popping up, pretty much ever since we got here, was going to see the Rockettes. As some know, Jen was a dancer of many varieties throughout her childhood and dreamed as a little girl of becoming a Rockette. I'm pretty sure that dream died when she took out the glass flamingo in Las Vegas, but still, going to see the Rockettes had been a long-term goal of hers...

So I got us tickets for a matinee show on Tuesday (her birthday) and off we went...

but first...

we had to go to the post office to deal with her passport (which she has touched on in a previous post)

That experience almost killed us...the one woman apparently in the post office that could handle passport stuff had to be the slowest woman possible...and not just slow with paperwork, but she did EVERYTHING SLOW...walked back and forth to the copier slow...TAAALLKKKEDDD SLOOOOOW....everything was at a glacial pace...she wasn't mean or DMV-attendant like or anything, but I'm fairly certain there were dead people who could have helped us with a little quicker pace...too much dawdling, I say! =)

Anyways, nearly an hour and a half later, we got out of the post office, on the A train, and headed to Radio City Music Hall!!!

The inside of the Hall is amazing...neither Jen nor I had any idea just how big it was...we were sitting in the orchestra section, but it was much larger than most theatres, with a couple of levels and balconies to boot..lots of people all eager to see the show.

And it was quite the show. Admittedly, I didn't get emotional about it like Jen did (she cried about 4 different times, she's such a softie) but it was neat to see the Rockettes do their routines and the rest of the show was fun...

Following that, we left and after a quick discussion with random strangers about Canada's health care system (don't ask) we walked over to Rockefeller Center to go ice skating...

But here's the deal with that...ice skating at Rockefeller Center may seem like a fun, easy thing to do, but the crowds are enormous, and its stupidly expensive...basically 25 bucks a person to skate per hour...as Jen might say "thats dumb," so we decided to walk down to Bryant Park and go ice skating there (larger ice surface, way cheaper).

Now, its still a little embarrassing that I'm the only native Canadian that can't ice skate all that well. I blame my parents, who forced me...FORCED ME from my native land at a young age during my learning formative years and brought me to 2 states (Florida, California) where ice skating wasn't even on the radar in the mid 80s and early 90s...

But despite my lack of ice expertise, I managed to get around the rink multiple times without falling once and with grabbing the wall several times, though I know there were a few looks of panic on my face during my skating time, like this one:

After that was over, we stopped by a shop and bought Cooper a "I Love New York" sweatshirt (I swear that dog has more clothes than me now) and then headed for home so we could participate in our local bar's trivia night.

Yes, Jen wanted to forgo any kind of a birthday dinner to make sure we were at our usual Tuesday Trivia Night at the Piper's Kilt. In fact, she looked at me like I was speaking Mandarin when I suggested skipping it. So we headed to the bar with Jen's co-worker from Cleveland Dawn (our other Cleveland native Helen wasn't there) and posted another score in the mid-70s. I swear, I'm going to change our team name from the Transplants to "Perfectly Mediocre" or maybe Jen's suggestion "That 70s Score."

We're somehow still in fifth place out of about 20 teams or so (in other words, we're the Utah Jazz of trivia) so we'll keep plugging away...

All in all, a pretty good 29th birthday for the love of my life....just 364 days till the next one...I should probably start planning now... =)