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Sunday was my birthday, and it was a great day.

It started at midnight, when Heather couldn’t stand to let me go one more minute without giving me my gifts. I love her. She does a great job of disguising gifts so they don’t look like their wrapping. One gift, a lovely copy of Fable II for XBox360, was inserted into a fedex-envelope, and then wrapped in several layers of tissue paper. It ended up looking like a t-shirt when all the wrapping was done! The second gift was inserted into a tiny box. I was totally in the dark about the second gift.

Back in the late summer, when we went to the Maryland Renaissance Festival, we came across a new merchant selling some unusual leatherworks. Tiny scrunched up faces rendered into leather items like bags and wallets. She bought me this:

Isn’t he cool? He’s a tr-fold wallet, and I’ve named him: “Leatherface Herbertchrist.”

The rest of the day was split between Panera writing sessions, and hitting that Fable II like a mother.

All-in-all, a fine way to turn 39.

Christ, I’m 39?

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Heather and I sat on the couch, watching the returns, and frantically alt-tabbing and F5′ing between a dozen web-sites. We read blog posts from the left and right, watched as the numbers in Loudoun County and the state of Virginia wavered between Red and Blue, and bit our nails to absolute nubs.

At the end of the day, though, not only did I get a Blue county – I got a Blue state, and a Blue country. At 11:00pm tonight, all the major networks called the election for Senator Barack Hussein Obama, our 44th President.

There are lots of people that suggest that this vote represents a sea-change, but I respectfully disagree. Even though I’m almost 39, I’ve seen enough elections, and have read enough history, to know that this is just one side of a cycle. I’ll likely see the pendulum swing back to conservative in eight to twelve years, and then back to liberal again some time after that.

The great wheel turns.

So, to my friends and family that supported the Republican ticket, I hope you don’t feel the same despair I felt in 2000 and 2004. I learned some time after those elections that the fundamentals of the country don’t change much for those of us firmly entrenched in the middle class. Those on the margins feel the biggest changes, and none of you are there.

You’ll be fine. Really. For all the doom and gloom I thought I would endure in 2000 and 2004, I was fine.