Fiddy

Jacquie and her girl called me Wednesday night, just after midnight east coast time, ten minutes into my birthday.

"You're fiddy!" she remarked, quite accurately.

She's right. I am fiddy.

"But," I rejoined, "Is there a sixty-dollar bill? Are there forty united states? Is there a thirty-cent piece?" No. No there is not. There are none of those. Fiddy is special and means something in this country, dammit.

But on a more personal level, it also means Mistah and I take a few days off and hightail it to the beach. The beach-beach. The Atlantic Ocean beach.

 This beach.

 And this hotel.

 The Pleasant View Inn, baby.

Not such a bad place to set up chairs and cooler and grinders for birthday luncheon . . .

. . . even with wacky and foreboding clouds over Watch Hill down the beach a couple of miles.

 But what did we care? We had a room, right on the ocean . . .

. . . and we had champers . . .

. . . and the clouds made for gorgeous high drama.

. . . really, they were the most fabulous birthday clouds ever.

And there is really only one thing to do at a time like that . . .

. . . have a photo shoot on the beach.

Because that is what we do.

Actually, that is what Mistah does.

Geeks? Oh, we're geeks.

Oh, look! In the distance! . . .

A bar! And not just any bar, but the venerable and infamous Andrea, back and better than ever, after Hurricane Sandy.

The sun came back out . . .

. . . our little friend Dylan took good care of us . . .

. . . we got Mistah all fancified . . .

. . . and we had ourselves a Birthday Time . . .

That's 100 years of combined experience and intelligence, 
right there.

And then?

All those clouds made for the most amazing sunset ever seen on the East Coast . . .

. . . a perfect birthday sunset just for me . . .

. . . leading us back to the Pleasant View.

This Fiddy thing isn't half bad.