Today's a break from the norm. Still listening to jazz records that may or may not be pick hit prospects, but not really trying to write about them today. I'll spend most of today cooking a rather extravagant dinner. The centerpiece is a rather ugly looking duck with head and toes intact. It's been drying out for a couple of days, and will go into the oven late this afternoon -- hopefully emerging as something resembling Peking Duck. Thought it would be nice to serve an elegant but simple Shark's Fin Soup with it, but I balked at $49 for the dried fin shreds. I've never done the duck before, but I've made the soup before, using canned shark fin that cost less than $10. Got some imitation shark fin -- a strange gelatin concoction -- but I'm not sure if it's worth using. Will have a few appetizers, ribs, wings, rice, eggplant and broccoli dishes, as well as the usual pancakes -- the one part of the spread that has me worried -- and a prefab cake for dessert.

This is the 2006 version of my birthday dinner. The first one I can recall was the night Bill Buckner blew the Series, but it really didn't become a tradition until a few years later. After I left Contex, I got together regularly with a couple of friends there. We often talked about food, and when my birthday came around I offered that the present that would make me happiest would be if I could cook for them. I cooked Chinese that night -- no longer recall just what, but it was a good deal more than tonight. Then each year after that, at least as long as I was in Boston, I did the same. I tried my hand at Indian and Turkish. The year I moved to New Jersey I did Indian again. Since moving back to Wichita, I've missed a couple of years, but have done Spanish and Thai. Last year I made feijoada -- one big dish rather than a lot of little ones. This year just started with the duck -- everything else is insurance if I screw that up.

Had to break to actually cook that dinner, so this part is afterwards. Didn't do the broccoli, which proved to be too much to handle too late. Did make something I forgot to list above: a salad with pork kidneys, tree ears and cucumber in a sesame sauce. Everything came out quite well, except for the frozen coconut cake -- my mother made a fabulous one, which I can do a pretty fair approximation of, but didn't want to put in the work this time. Probably a reasonable decision, given how much wear and tear everything else was. One thing that aging does is to test your faith in progress.

So another day, another year. This makes 56. It's been a rough one. But one thing I like about the birthday dinner ritual is that it shows it's still possible to accomplish something extraordinary, even if just for a moment.