Coupeville Sports

     This is EXACTLY the same look my middle nephew, three-year old Walker, gets when he’s up to something.

         Seconds later the notoriously creaky deck at my Nana’s house crumbled and we fell into the ocean!!

Sure, they call it “espresso…”

“They’re not just burritos, they’re all-natural, green burritos, man. Only $1!!”

“Well hello there, ladies!!”

It’s Justin Bieber’s birthday today. So, there’s that.

Of more importance, however, is March 1 is also the birthday of my little sister, Sarah (Svien) Kirkconnell, a much more talented person than the swaggy one.

We’re not going to publicly say which birthday this is (it’s a round one), as I am unsure what her mood might be this morning.

Since I still bear the (psychological) scars from when she charged down a hallway and launched herself, velociraptor-style, onto my back after I changed the channel in the midst of a Cure marathon on MTV (that’ll tell you her age…), I am a little more cautious these days.

There was also the time she took a bunch of fuzzy caterpillars, mashed them together, cooked them on the grill and tried to pass them off as a hamburger to me. And then the time she … how much time do we have?

But the girl with the sky-high Mohawk who hung out at espresso places in the pre-Starbucks, much more “smoke-filled” days, has become a wife, mother of three boys and the founder of a staggeringly successful internet food empire.

She may not quite be Martha Stewart yet, but you try and make a run at her in the world of on-line food bloggers and you’ll find a tofu horse head in your bed the next morning. No one messes with her daily UPS and FedEx deliveries, box upon box of goodies from every company under the sun.

While she’s 22 months younger than I am, she has always been the smarter one. The one with more business sense. The one who accomplished things.

The little girl who used to kick people in the nads and then stand there innocently twisting her foot in the ground, making googly, Shirley Temple eyes at the principal (while I got detention after detention and more than once had to wear the plaid pants they kept in the office for people who got themselves covered in mud) grew up to became a barista goddess (who hit me in the face with a phone during our days at Videoville and Miriam’s Espresso).

The young women once caught on King-5 elbowing fellow Grateful Dead fans in the face in a battle for a better seat has become the epitome of a successful adult.

Every day, in every way, she has become a remarkable person. Our parents would be very proud of where she has taken her life.

They aren’t here to tell her that, but I know it to be true.

From the days when she was obsessed with seeing EVERY SINGLE Jean-Claude Van Damme film on the big screen to the days of driving a mini-van, she’s come a long way and done it with style.

Happy birthday, Silver!!

Oh, I’m gonna pay for that one…