It's my birthday!

And for those of you who know me - you know this is pretty much the most important day to me in the year. Not for presents or anything like that, but just because it's MY day. So today I have taken the day off and had planned to laze about the house waiting for Staples to deliver our new filing cabinet (yay Lisa! more organizing!) and watch TV etc until Hasan's sister Evelan came over to see our place. However, workmen are here making quite the racket replacing all our windows and they've kicked me out of the living room and the master bedroom. So here I am, on my birthday, in front of the computer. What's so different about that, I wonder...

But, it's a good time to take care of odds and ends, like calling up my old health insurance company to find out where my prescription reimbursements are (joy!) and, much more interesting to you, uploading some photos.

Here are the pics we took upon entry into Pennsylvania and the first few days in Philly.

If Staples comes on time, I'd like to go check out the Water Works which are very close to our home. The Water Works were the first municipal project to actually provide for clean drinking water for ordinary American citizens. Now, I wouldn't drink the water anywhere near the Schuykill River, but the architecture must be pretty amazing.

I am looking forward to Evelan coming over. It's nice to start getting to know H's family. She works a few blocks away as a teaching assistant. That's strange to me - to have family be just a few blocks away. The other night I stopped at his other sister Shineal's house to meet her and her daughter Janae for the first time. We had a lovely and rather deep chat over tea. I look forward to more. The funniest moments had to be when her daughter kept coming up with excuses to come out of bed - one of which was to tell her mother that she wanted Hasan to call her after I left "so they could chat"...presumably about me. 7 year olds are funny.

Later on tonight, we'll go out to dinner at Bindi. Very interesting take on Indian cuisine from what I hear - can't wait to try it! One strange thing about Philly restaurants - most don't serve alchohol and are BYOB (which you will see in every restaurant's URL), and they are cash only. Really annoying. If I were a criminal I would just look for groups of ladies heading towards a restaurant - they probably have a chunk of cash and a liquor bottle...what a catch! (For a quick overview of the alcohol policy in Pennsylvania, read this. I apparently broke the law by bringing the Wendy & Ben Signature Baby Shower wine bottle into this state. It's all Tallulah's fault!)