They say it's my birthday. It's my birthday too yeah.

Best phrase of the day: birthday pancake. I had a birthday pancake this morning. Holly and I were invited over to Richard's house for breakfast--he's the president of Project Vote Smart and lives there in a house on the ranch, and he hosts these orientation breakfasts for new folks where he cooks for you and then explains some of the history and philosophy behind the project, which may sound a little boring, but it's not. He's really kind of fascinating to listen to. This is a man who ran against John McCain for Barry Goldwater's vacated Senate seat back in the 1980s. He lost, obviously. But this morning when I walked in he had a pancake with a candle in it and sang happy birthday. Holly told his wife that it was my birthday, so she passed the news along.

As soon as we were all oriented, we left PVS for bigger skies. Big Sky, Montana to be exact. I don't know why, but several people thought we were sleeping in a teepee tonight, others thought we were back in Colorado. I guess a blog isn't enough. Maybe we need to get major news networks to announce our whereabouts. We drove about 3 and a half hours to Big Sky, which is a ski resort. We had grand plans to play disc golf on the mountain--you take the ski ride up, and play your way down. As soon as we bought the tickets though it started to rain and the temperature dropped to 45 degrees, so we wisely decided not to play. Unfortunately there's not much to do around here in the summer when it rains, but we made the best of it. We headed to Lone Peak Brewery for some drinks and chips and salsa, plus a rousing game of bananagrams (which Holly won) and then an equally rousing (look how excited my hand looks in the picture!) game of shuffleboard (which Holly won). She tells me that now that I'm 30, I need to learn that I can't win all the time. We had dinner at Choppers, a motorcycle themed restaurant. Then we got some wine and ice cream and headed to back to the hotel to relax with some America's Got Talent (strangely addicting) and the hot tub. All in all, a good day. Oh, and I won $5 on Virginia lottery tickets. Score.