Another Year Older...

...for someone special in our family.  Marty's birthday is today.  Our tradition, as a family, is to go out to dinner to celebrate at the restaurant of choice for the birthday person.  This year, we had to give that a great deal of consideration given that it could mean a couple bags of groceries, or a tank of gas, or could be needed to go towards the mortgage or utilities somewhere down the road.  We decided to go ahead and go out and enjoyed a nice meal at Macaroni's Grill.  If you don't have them in your area, they're an Italian style restaurant.  We hadn't been there in several years, and I have to say it was nice going on a Tuesday evening :)  No waiting!  

The birthday boy had a grilled salmon plate while Nick and I each had "Penne Rustica" which is penne pasta with prosciutto, shrimp, chicken in a nice creamy sauce with some Parmesan grated on top, yum, that's what I always have when I go there and I brought half home for tomorrow's lunch.  Marty enjoyed his salmon as well as his individual chocolate cake served with a side of whipped cream sprinkled with nuts and a small pot of chocolate to dip it in, or I suppose you could pour it over the top.  They also sang happy birthday in Italian.  The singers had wonderful, harmonized, well-trained voices which was awesome because I wouldn't have expected those voices to come from the two singers.  The female had a speech impediment that I had to listen to very carefully to catch her words when we were chatting, and the gent, a thin young man of Asian descent, came out with a wonderful deep rich voice that I would have expected from a classic portly Italian tenor. Just goes to show, never judge a book by its cover, and you'd think I'd have learned that by now.

Tomorrow is the day Marty has a "weeding out" phone interview with a prospective employer.  Pray that this turns into a belated birthday gift by turning into a full-time job.  It's hard keeping him encouraged.  I know many out there are struggling finding jobs, and have been unemployed longer than Marty, and for those I would offer a prayer for relief too.  Marty has never been unemployed since his college days, so he's learning a whole new ball game, so to speak.  And since college, he's only worked for two agencies, one a university, the other an internet start-up.  There is a huge diversity of skills required in any given company looking for software developers/computer programmers, so while he may have many of the skills they're looking for, he may not have all their requirements.