Fun Ways to Celebrate Your Birthday

As you may know, I am a huge fan of birthdays and not just mine. I am a huge fan of yours as well. I think you should celebrate our birthday to the fullest and if I happen to be around I'd love to celebrate with you. I just think birthdays are to be celebrated. I mean it is the one day of the year that you get to be in your own little spotlight (or if lucky you can share the spotlight with a friend who also happens to have the very same birthday you do) and be happy to have been born. Recently a friend suggested that I should be celebrating my mom on my birthday since she's the whole "birth" part of the equation. I gave that a moments reflection and despite a great deal of gratitude for having been given birth to, I dismissed the idea. That is what Mother's Day is for - celebrating motherhood surely includes celebrating the birthing part.

Anyway, part of what I love about my birthday is that it is a really good tool for prodding others into getting together. On a random Tuesday I'm not going to be all that successful in cajoling a group of my friends to convene for some drinks and laughs. However, turn that random Tuesday into a birthday Tuesday and wah lah, your friends will magically free up their calendars and show up in a place of my choosing. As a result, I feel a heavy responsibility to choose a good place and ideally a place that offers more than a place to sit and beer on tap. That will do for a random Tuesday but is hardly befitting birthday Tuesday.

So, this year the birthday activity was arcade golf. I don't actually know if that is what it is called but that is what it is. It is a fully electronicized driving range where each of your golf balls in electronically fingerprinted as your ball and as you drive it into the range it sends little e-golf messages back to the monitor in your driving range bay. These little messages appear on your monitor, next to your name, as points (or as no points in many cases) depending on where your ball landed in the range. You see the range is riddled with targets with concentric rings (think skee ball or a dart board) and if you happen to land your ball in one of these targets you get points.

Now aside from swinging a golf club and hitting a golf ball this really doesn't resemble golf at all. First of all, the person with the MOST points wins. And then there is the business of earning lots of points for shanking a worm burner 10 feet to your left (or right) while getting no points for long straight 100yrd drives. Regardless, its fun. So I highly recommend it for your next birthday celebration.

In case you were wondering, we went here: http://www.topgolfusa.com/