I turned 38 this past Monday, June 13, and I’ve had a wonderful time celebrating. My husband and I kicked off the festivities on Saturday night—we did an early birthday celebration together because he had to work on the night of my actual birthday. He surprised me by making dinner reservations at Beetle House, the new Beetlejuice/Tim Burton-inspired restaurant in the East Village! Beetlejuice is one of my all-time favorite movies and I’d been wanting to check the place out. We got verrry mildly goth’d out for the evening, by which I mean we wore black and I did a smoky eye look. Okay, totally not goth. 😛
The decor inside Beetle House was totally on point:
To drink, I got the Beetles Juice cocktail, and to eat I had the Cheshire Mac, which has SEVEN cheeses and sweet stewed tomatoes. The mac and cheese was yummy, but it was a heavy dish so I didn’t even get close to finishing it.
After dinner, we took a steamy stroll over to Soho and held court in The Salon at the Soho Grand Hotel for a while, drinking wine, and people watching. There was some MAJOR side boob in the group sitting across from us…but props to the woman for totally pulling it off.
On my actual birthday, I got up and thought, “well, obviously I have to treat myself with a sheet mask today!” So I put on the SNP Animal Panda Whitening Mask from my Memebox sheet mask haul a few months ago (it doesn’t seem to be available on Memebox anymore, so I’ve linked to Amazon here). This one was especially hard to fit on my face—I don’t know why the eye holes are so small on so many sheet masks! But it was fun to be a creepy panda for 20 minutes on my birthday. 🙂
On my actual birthday evening, I met my husband at work for drinks. I’m not allowed to say where, but I can say that I had a lovely birthday evening celebration!
Every year, my mom asks me for a list of gift ideas. This year I decided to throw a spiralizer on my list, because I’d seen some yummy-looking vegetti recipes on Pinterest and wanted to try them out. So I picked out the Spiralife spiralizer, which hit my three main needs: 1) it’s compact, 2) it has good reviews, and 3) it’s inexpensive. This was one of the first birthday presents to arrive at my house, and I’ve tried it once already with excellent results. More on that in a later post…
The below photo shows most of the rest of my birthday gift haul:
What I received:
- The Necromancer’s House by Christopher Buehlman
- The Enchanted Orchid by Max Fulcher
- Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith
- Brooklyn Candle Studio’s Folks + Fleura Candles in Savasana and Sunday Morning
- Amazon gift card
- Visa gift credit card
- Starbucks gift card
- re:p Bio Fresh Mask with Real Calming Herb (which I got a sample of in my January k-beauty Birchbox and have been loving!)
- GAP ORIGINAL 1969 best girlfriend shorts
- GAP Summer Shorts (color: Twig)
- Not pictured: a GAP romper and a pair of GAP best girlfriend jeans, but neither of them fit too well so I’m going to go to a store and try some things on and hopefully do some exchanging.
- Also not pictured: a Brassavola nodosa orchid from my husband! You can read all about it on my orchid blog.
I also want to give a special shout-out to Brooklyn Candle Studio for their lovely packaging. Also, they included a cute card (which I forgot to photograph) with a handwritten note. The card had an illustrated cocktail on the front and a recipe for the cocktail on the back. These thoughtful details really elevate a gift package! Contrast this with the GAP’s apparent new policy of just sending a flattened gift box in the package along with the gift items, rather than shipping the gift pre-boxed like you’d expect. (I will add that my mom complained to the GAP about their lazy gift packaging and they apologized and gave us a 15% off discount code. So that was good customer service.)
All in all, my 38th birthday has been great and I’m looking forward to what the next year has in store for me. 🙂
