happy b'day, sweet knees!

A kind of creepy guy who works in my office poked his head in my door yesterday and asked why I had a pound of butter on my desk. I answered, as any sane person would, “because it’s easier to bake with when it’s at room temperature.” He seemed satisfied with that and moved on.

My partner’s birthday is today, and last night I made her most favorite cake in the whole wide world: pound cake with orange-butter frosting—from her grandmother’s recipe. As I said, I needed the butter to be at room temperature, and I had shopped for needed ingredients on the way to work Wednesday. Leaving the butter in the trunk of my car with the rest of the ingredients would have resulted in butter soup, so there it sat on my desk, left in plain sight so that I’d remember to take it home.


I was very relieved to receive a call today confirming that a custom gift I had ordered was ready for pickup. It was one of those deals with an artisan type, so it really could have gone either way. He knew I had a Thursday deadline, but he wasn’t sure he had the materials for what I wanted. (I can be less vague about this in a later post, once she’s already received the goods.) Suffice to say, I’m thrilled that this guy delivered, ’cause I didn’t want to crap all over her birthday by not having something meaningful to offer. I mean, she’s not a material girl—I don’t want to make it sound like I had to buy her something—but I was going to have to scramble to, I dunno, make her a decoupage jewelry box if my idea fell through. She’s already received shampoo (!) from her mother, and an unmarked box from Amazon courtesy of her father—he hadn’t checked the “gift” box. She opened it thinking it was something she had ordered and found some DVDs that she had asked for. Her father, normally aces at the gift-giving thing, had forgotten to have the Amazon elves wrap them.

Since she already knew what many of her presents were and was going to work and therapy today, she was feeling kind of down about her birthday, so you can understand why I didn’t want to be responsible for more disappointment. Thank God for artisans who take deadlines seriously. Wish me luck!