I toyed with a lot of different ideas about how to celebrate my 50th birthday, but I ultimately decided to stay in Seattle and party with friends. I have reserved a suite for myself at the Alexis Hotel, and I'm in the process of planning activities. I'm going to have a party at the hotel on Saturday night, brunch on Sunday morning followed by an outing to see the new Broadway-bound musical version of "The Wedding Singer," followed by game night back at my hotel room. Then on Monday (my actual birthday) I'm going to spend the day being pampered at Ummelina Day Spa, and follow that up with dinner at the Dahlia Lounge, my favorite Seattle restaurant.

This is going to cost a fortune (even with my guests paying their way for everything except the Saturday night party), and it has me questioning the sanity and wisdom of spending so much money all in one weekend. But, hey, what the hell!

I've built a little web site for my invitees to learn about the events and RSVP, but my web hosting doesn't seem to be supporting ASP.NET properly for the time being. I've opened a ticket with them, and I'm hoping they resolve the issue soon so I can get it posted and start planning based on how many people I expect. I had a lot of fun building the app, but I want to be able to use it, so they'd better get it fixed!

Meanwhile, at work, I've been put onto a big project. Lots of responsibility, lots of effort, and not a lot of time. But I'm exciting about getting started on it after spending the last month doing maintenance and bug fixes. I'm going to be revamping the entire subscription ticketing area of the Seattle Symphony web site. It's mostly back-end, integrating with Tessitura, which they currently use for their single-ticket functionality. It's the first site here that is doing subscriptions in this way, so I feel good that they are giving me this responsibility, especially since there is no real model to base it on. I'm pretty nervous about it, but I feel confident that I can pull it off.