Check out my recipe for Quinoa-Stuffed Red Peppers, over at my food blog, Eating Back to Good!

Sunday was my birthday.  I did not get a tattoo (*gasp*, I know).  I turned 29.  I’m having some emotional issues with it, really.  I don’t know…maybe I just continued to feel like I was really just a kid since I was still in my twenties.  That’s all going to be over soon.  Thirty.  It’s so…grown-up.  I know, you guys are laughing because I’m already crotchety enough to be Sophia from The Golden Girls.  I’m a skeptic, a cynic, and I’m sarcastic and grumpy.  If I’m already that way, I’m a little scared of what I’m going to be like in another thirty years.

But it’ll be on paper that I’m grown up.  It was also interesting to me this weekend hearing my parents and grandparents reminisce about their childhoods.  Both of my parents worked in the peach sheds when they were kids.  My grandma (Dad’s mom) did too.  They were doing hard labor, working with sometimes dangerous machinery.  I don’t really have anything interesting like that to reminisce about.  I have Rainbow Brite, My Little Ponies, He-Man, The Smurfs and about a zillion other pop culture references to look back on, but I really don’t have stories about what I accomplished.  I went to school.  I got made fun of in middle school because I was white.  I was smart and graduated near the top of my class.  But I worked as a receptionist at Weight Watchers.  It wasn’t particularly challenging or physically taxing.

I don’t know…I just feel like I kind of missed out on something.  On “Real Life?”  Maybe?  I don’t know.  I don’t really know how to process the feeling, but it was a little weird…like, really proud to be a part of a family with such an interesting and hard-working history, but a little sad that society had changed so much by the time I was born that I don’t have a lot of history to speak of.

Anyway…just some rambling, near-thirty introspection.  I now return you to your regularly-scheduled jocularity: