Birthday redux.

Incidentally, my actual birthday featured several highlights.

Yesterday afternoon, Dad and I went to lunch for our usual Benjie's birthday/Father's Day combined celebration.

During lunch, Dad talked about meeting my future sister-in-law's parents last week during a dinner with his wife, my brother, his fiancee, her parents, my mother and my stepfather.

Getting my parents and their spouses together always amuses me because they all do well at getting along socially. The drama queen in me always wants there to be some kind of catfight or for my parents to show an uncomfortable closeness with one another that irks someone. But, dammit, they usually get along.

My mother told me that the dinner went well, even though the restaurant was noisy. (She's 80 percent deaf, suffers from Minear's Disease and wears a hearing aid.)

At one point, because my father gets my birthday confused with other significant dates, Mom and Dad ended up accidentally and awkwardly discussing their wedding anniversary in front of their new spouses. (That, apparently, was as melodramatic as it got. And everyone laughed about it.)

Dad told me that my stepfather also mentioned how much my stepbrother makes for a living ... and how much my apparently-horribly-obese stepbrother - whom I avoid and haven't seen in a year - now weighs. My father laughed about this.

"Your stepbrother better be careful," Dad said. "That wife of his was too pretty for him even when he was thin."

For my birthday, Dad, in an awesome and completely unpredictable move, brought me a slow cooker.

Apparently, my stepmother remembered me mentioning wanting one, which is cool because - ahem - I did want one, even though I never cook for anyone other than myself outside of Thanksgiving. The slow cooker will help me fulfill a dream.

I have a dream. Someday, some grand day off in the future, I will entertain people. I will use my slow cooker, my library of cookbooks, my decently-stocked kitchen and my hidden culinary talents to concoct epicurian delights for a variety of dinner guests, who will all be sitting in my CLEAN apartment and marveling both at how well I've decorated and how cute my long-term boyfriend is.

"Gosh, Benjie, you've really got it all together now," a smiling friend will whisper to me. "And this pot roast you made is EXCELLENT."

Yes, I have a dream. And now I have a crock pot, which pushes me one more step toward its realization.

At lunch with me, my father also started to reminisce endlessly about Fuzzy, a dog he got during his first years of marriage to my mother.

Fuzzy, whom I remember because she died when I was about 7, apparently rivals Lassie in my father's memory as the greatest dog who ever lived.

So at lunch, even when we started talking about something else, my father would break away from that conversation and say randomly, "God, she was the best dog ... You didn't have to even walk her. You could just let her out. She wouldn't go across the street. And then, she would just come back when she was done. And Fuzzy was black, black as midnight, so that in the dark she was able to scare off anyone who approached the house. God, she was the best dog ..."

It's weird. I used to not speak to my father at all. Now, I freakin' love lunches with my dad.

That afternoon, Mark and I met at Ansley Mall, and he gave me a fun card. We were in The Toy Shop there, so Mark and I decided to annoy the clerks by setting off every noise-making child's toy in the store.

After that, we headed to the Starbucks, grabbed coffee and then sat outside the L.A. Fitness. For 45 minutes, we entertained ourselves by praising and criticizing the physical attributes of everyone who walked by.

"I shouldn't judge people," I told him, not quite admitting that it was wrong.

"Oh, I judge EVERYBODY," Mark said.

I went home after that and finished watching my completely amazing NIP/TUCK DVDs. (The premiere is tonight on FX, but I have to work. Luckily, they're replaying it this week. Also, finishing the DVDs of NIP/TUCK will now allow me to move along and start watching the GILMORE GIRLS DVDs that Lupo sent me for my birthday.)

Then, I unpacked my crock pot, made the first step toward cleaning my kitchen and realizing the dream and went to bed.