Malaya's surprise of the day was a trip to
The Bone Room. I first heard of it years and years ago, I was on their mailing list more than a decade ago down south in San Diego, but until yesterday, I'd never been there. As you'll see if you browse around their site a bit, they basically sell dead animal parts. All sorts of parts, including bones, skulls, claws, teeth, horns, and so on. They've also got lots of huge tropical insects mounted in glass cases or just in plastic bags, a few stuffed animal carcasses, weird jewelry and baubles, feathers, animal pelts, and much, much more. We spent a good hour+ browsing and hadn't gone through half the stuff there, and it's not a very large store. Just crammed, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, with cool stuff.
Malaya said I could have whatever I wanted, though that's obviously got to be kept within reason in a store filled with $500+ skulls and articulated animal skeletons. We got some jewelry, some cool pewter pendants, a rabbit hide that the cats went crazy over, skull key chains, a 10" brown and white striped African porcupine quill, and lots of other small items. Our one larger purchase was my birthday present, and you saw a glimpse of it in the earlier update. The cats went crazy sniffing it too.
It's some kind of sheep skull, but what type we do not know. The tag in the store said simply "fancy sheep," and it's obviously a male, with those horns, but that's about all I can tell you. I'd like to know more about the provenance, so I'll probably try to identify it by the horns at some point. It's going to be just one of many in my eventual bone/skull collection, after all.
I put it above my monitor, of course, and yes, it's staring down at me even as I write this. I love it, and it seems like a "write more fiction" guardian to me, but then again I've always loved skulls, so I would think that.
Lastly, this has nothing to do with my birthday, but I found the staff of the Bone Room curious. The owner is just what we expected; old white guy, looks sort of professorial, seems slightly-cranky while being absurdly-knowledegable in his field. The store was much busier than I'd have expected though, and his staff, three women in their early twenties were very busy selling things, answering questions, and doing a lot of phone orders. One looked average; brown hair, okay face, slightly pudgy, etc. Just like 90% of the women her age I see in a given year. The other two were amusing though, in that they were super-goth girls. Like above and beyond the
Suicide Girls minimum requirement. All black clothing, huge tattoos on their arms, neck, back, etc, jet black dyed hair; one in dreads and the other straight and perfect like Morticia Addams, much facial jewelry, etc.
They were sort of "lipstick goths," to coin (?) a phrase, in that they were slim and feminine in looks, and very normal in their mannerisms. Entering that store for the first time has to be a strange experience for anyone who has done business with the Bone Room over the phone, since while we were there I heard both the goth girls taking and making orders, and they both had perfect phone voices and manners. They were friendly and helpful, so I'm certainly not complaining about their look or style; I've just got to wonder what they look like when they go out clubbing if that's how they dress for work. Also, I'd be interested to hear how they decided to go that far goth, and how they ended up working in such a strangely-appropriate place of business. Not that I'm ever likely to gain answers to any of these questions; I'm just thinking aloud.
After exhausting ourselves and our budget in the Bone Room, we picked up some sandwiches at
a tiny Greek sandwich place in the area, and drove down to the Berkeley Marina, where we braved gale-force winds to eat our sandwiches and fruit salads in the open air looking out over the bay, towards the distant Golden Gate bridge. Next stop, Japan. I might be exaggerating a bit when I saw "gale-force" but I've never before had pieces of lettuce actually blow off of my sandwich.
From there we headed home, and while I did some computer work Malaya was off to the gym. She returned around 6, and I left shortly thereafter for Kali class. The Birthday stuff was not over yet though, and when I got back at 9:30 she'd made salad, cooked a big crustless quiche-like thing, baked catfish and veggies, and even scored fat slices of my two favorite types of pie: pecan and cheesecake. It was quite the feast, and made all the more delicious by the fact that I did not have to prepare it, clean up after it, or think about it anyway.
I'm feeling a bit guilty about the all the birthday stuff at this point, since I've never done this much for Malaya on her birthdays past, and I honestly don't know that I ever will, much though I'd like to. She doesn't expect me to though; she's doing all these nice things because she really loves me and wants to do nice things for me, and while that's an odd concept to wrap my brain around, I'm working at it.
Hers is really the best attitude to take towards someone else's fun, though. Don't do it because you expect recompense, or equivalence. Give someone a present or a card or whatever because you care about them and because you want them to have it. Don't tie your own hoped-for card or present or whatever to that, since that turns it from a gift into an obligation, and it will make you unhappy if you don't get as good as you gave. Besides, if you follow that math you probably owe your parents a car, a down payment on a house, and about four new wardrobes, and that's just getting started on what you owe them for raising you.
This is rationalizing, a bit, since I've gone in on the card and gift and such for three of our mutual friends in the past year, and none of them remembered me in any way this week. I could get angry about that and feel ripped off, or castigate them for being thoughtless or ungrateful or whatever, but what would be the point in that? They're all very busy in their real lives, and they're all friends of Malaya's that I just know through her, so really, what did I expect? About what I got, to be honest. They've done lots of small things I've benefited from in the past anyway, and who am I, the one who usually ignores it almost entirely, to complain about other people not paying enough attention to my birthday?
