Easter dinner and the annual egg hunt at my parent's house followed by a very unceremonial opening of the gifts for my sister and me (her birthday is on the 20^th, so we pack both into one party and one cake). I say "unceremonial" because the gifts usually are opened in front of everyone and the cards read out loud for each present presented (?!). This year, my sister and I stood at a half cleared dining room table opening gifts in front of five various family members cleaning off dishes. Odd, but I guess that this is the start of things to come. Now for the gift results:

And the gift that keeps on giving…

A head cold. Yes, I know you could give a rat’s tokhas about my health, but it sucks to take the day off for your birthday and wake up feeling like someone crammed a wad of Gummi Bears up your nose. The Missus managed to get the day off as well and she felt about as good. So we slept in late, took in a movie (go see "The Girl Next Door" if you haven't already), had dinner, walked the mall and called it a day.

I was going to write yesterday about turning 31, but I realized halfway into the writing that I was starting the old hand wringing efforts that come with older birthdays. Why am I here? What am I doing with this life? Pure existentialist crap. Just start sending the toys my way come Monday.

Why is it that people stop giving decent gifts as you get older? Well, let me rephrase that. When you’re younger (roughly any age before 25 we’ll say), birthdays and the associated gifts rock, likely because the bulk of the gifts are toys (save the flaming hot pink sweater Aunt Edwina knits for you every year). Toys are cool at any time, but birthday toys often rock better than most.

After 25, things start getting sketchy in the gift department. Sure, friends might still spring for Star Wars action figures or some sort of Nerf based product, but relatives tend to cut you off pretty quick from being a kid. One year, you’re dodging a hail of foam darts, the next year you get a small card telling you that the first issue of Consumer Reports is headed to your mailbox. And once you get your own house, forget it. It’s an orange gift card to Home Dropout, plain and simple. Maybe a leaf rake if you ask nicely.

Much of my early birthday plunder was Transformers and Lego sets. Lego sets always earned high marks in my book and usually came in two classes for me: Space Lego sets and those slated for the Box. Which I liked more, I really can’t say. Space Legos were carefully assembled and each frame of the directions memorized down to the last detail, lest you forgot if that antenna was one peg over or two. The fate of your newly colonized Moon Base could hang in the balance. They were played with great care save for my friend Jimmy, who often found it amusing to see if my spaceships could actually fly. I got back at him once with a croquet mallet. We don’t discuss that… unpleasantness any more.

The Box Legos were parts of kits given by relatives with either a limited selection at their local store or didn’t realize I had gone space age with my toys. They were kept in an aging cardboard box in the front hall closet and reworked more times than Middle East peace treaties (insert drum fill here). Every time I opened that box it was like discovering the wreck of the Atocha. It provided me, my friends, and my nieces and nephews countless hours of creative design work. Tanks, planes, cars, houses, robots, anything we could up with in our minds we slapped together with these happy little hunks of plastic.

Lego purchases dropped off steadily for me since high school. I managed to get one as a stocking stuffer last Christmas (my one sister still realizes that I just might never grow up and feeds that notion when she can). By this time, however, Lego had created so many specialized pieces that you could pretty much build the item on the box and not much else.

Now I’m pushing the big three-one and I’m craving the old school Legos. Last year, I found a sale on a few sets in Toys ‘R’ Us. If you saw me that day, you’d think I was buying Penthouse in front of my grandparents. I even snuck them down to the basement when the Missus wasn’t around just to be sure my addiction wouldn’t be discovered. I don’t even have the nerve to break into them yet, lest she wander down and find me reverted back to age 10. If I do, I know I will be opening a Pandora’s box.

(Steps up on soapbox. Teeters, then steps down and stands next to it.) The government always moves too slowly on too many things. I do and don't blame them. Whenever you have a large structure of people (government, corporations, etc.) what happens in the lower ranks rarely reaches the ears and eyes of the governing bodies. Unless it is something that could affect the group structure (embezzling, harassment charges, impeachment, etc.), those in the positions in power tend to ignore other problems. They’re background issues, not worthy of serious consideration, at least until something goes wrong. Such as it is with terrorism and the environment.

We knew that there were terrorists out there. Considering almost every country in the world has had some sort of terrorist attack laid against it, it’s almost a given that we would eventually be attacked. I’m not saying we were standing there in our stained wifebeater T-shirt, grabbing our crotch and saying, "Bomb this, yo." It was simply a statistical possibility that if various U.S. embassies and interests are bombed across the world, someone is finally going to take a shot at us on home soil. It happened on 9/11/01 and now, years later, we’re still playing the Great American Blame Game as to why this wasn’t reported to higher authorities. Because, up until those planes hit the Towers, it was a background issue.

The environment is a background issue as well. When you see massive deforestation or crippling pollution in some far flung country, you think how horrible that is for "those people over there" and then you change the channel. The environment gets the same short attention span in politics. It’s not a pressing issue like terrorism or tax cuts, it’s a football that helps people win reelections. You tell the voters how you pushed for better SUV emissions while you campaign in a Suburban. You talk up your environmental track record while quietly smashing out the teeth of any useful legislation for fear you’ll lose your backers in Detroit.

And when asthma and lung diseases start outnumbering auto deaths, when skin cancer becomes so prevalent doctors will have mall kiosks for treatment, maybe then we will see that the environment is something we can’t ignore. Until then, I have to assume that we’ll be seeing snow forecasts well into May.