Paid BART to You

My father turns 65 this coming Saturday, and he was in town this past weekend for a visit. It seemed the ideal chance for an early birthday kickoff celebration so I made a cake (yellow cake with chocolate frosting) and surprised him with it when they arrived on Saturday afternoon.*

After dinner, I handed the alphabet candles (spelling Happy Birthday, one candle per letter) to Eric to put in the cake and went off to do something (I have no idea what). When I came back, my father had somehow been put in charge of decorating his own cake and was, apparently, in an anagramatic mood. He proudly displayed his handiwork, a reference no doubt to the fact that they had come to our place via BART that day.


So of course we all sang "Paid BART to you, Paid BART to you, Paid BART Paid BART, Paid BART to you."

My father was very pleased.


*I also surprised all of us by accidentally dropping it on the floor. Luckily, the 5 second rule applies to birthday cakes so we quickly scooped it up and declared it no worse than before. This prompted Mykael to tell the story of a Thanksgiving long ago when her grandmother proudly marched a meticulously prepared roasted turkey from the kitchen into the dining room only to have the whole thing slide off the tray and onto the floor. "No matter," she said coolly. "I've got another one just like it in the kitchen." She then gracefully took the getaway bird back in the kitchen for take 2.

Winner

For a little fun at our recent offsite, my firm held an "Awkward Photo" contest. Being pretty competitive, I was quick to send in my triptych submission:

In the photo on the left I am proudly showing off a few Christmas presents: my new map of the world jacket and my new t-shirt which reads: "I love my cat and the feline is mutual". I was totally awesome.

In the middle photo I am wearing my very special horse sweater. As you can see, each horse has hairy mane which goes down the length of the arm. What you probably can't tell from the photo is that it was on a velcro strip so that you could, if you wanted to, put the white mane on the black horse and vice versa. It was quite a versatile sweater, you see.

I don't really know what to say about the picture on the right other than that I seem to be holding up my nightgown to show off my slippers, as though that was part of the outfit? It's unclear.

Would you be surprised if I told you the middle picture was the Grand Prize Winner of the whole contest? It's true. The Applause-o-meter, my colleague Leslie, registered the highest applause for my photo (out of three finalists) so I was the winner! Then as the winner I got a round of applause, and I stood up to graciously accept the prize* and bask in my glory and/or shame or confused mix thereof (so it was actually exactly like most of my childhood).


*The prize was, in fact, the round of applause.

Evolution

Came in today to some new faces in my herd of balloons. Literally.

I work with great people.

Cleaning Lady Macbeth

We had a cleaning lady come over last week to do the kind of deep cleaning that is really best outsourced and she did an extremely thorough job.

My mother was here this past weekend and on Saturday she was making a pumpkin pie.

"I don't know how to use your oven," she called to me from the kitchen.

"Just turn the knob to the temperature you want," I called, rolling my eyes like the salty teenager I still sometimes become when my mother is around.

"But how do you know the temperatures?" she insisted, sounding truly at a loss.

I finally went to show her how to turn the numbered knob and discovered that she had a very real reason to be confused: the oven knob had been scrubbed so clean that all of the numbers indicating the temperature points were gone. The knob was blank.

We thought we could still maybe see the bottoms of two zeroes that was probably where 400 degrees had been, so we took a Sharpie and wrote in some temps where we thought they belonged.

We have since burned the pumpkin pie and a lasagna, so I think we need to recalibrate.

Balloon farm

For our Halloween party last week, my colleagues blew up about 50 balloons and when I came to work on Monday morning they were all in my office. Look - there they are:

As you would expect, this has prompted a new ritual when people come to meet with me in my office: they stand facing the wall or corner and do a little jig, kicking their legs straight out while keeping their hands more or less at their sides. Like a drunk Michael Flatley. Sometimes they make gleeful squawking or chirping noises too.

I like this ritual a lot and I want to keep it going as long as I can. As these balloons start to deflate (which, as an aside, they show no signs of doing even a week later), I am going to secretly blow up new balloons and replace the shrivelly ones. I think this is going to work. I am now an undercover balloon farmer.

Happy Halloween!

Per our annual Halloween tradition, Eric and I carved up some pumpkins this year.

Can you guess who did which one? I'll give you a hint: mine is the better one.

Yankee Doodle went to the symphony

Eric and I went to the symphony last night to hear Joshua Bell (and to try to get the Movers of Arabia out of our heads).

He was wonderful!

He was called back to the stage five times by the thunderous applause and finally agreed to do an encore. He said nothing - just raised his violin and launched into a piece in his typical highly animated fashion. Maybe a minute into his emotional performance it became clear: he was playing Yankee Doodle.*

This elaborate and at times gut-wrenchingly heartfelt rendition of Yankee Doodle went on for several minutes and afterward people erupted into even more thunderous applause; these people simply could not clap loud enough for Joshua Bell. I had the feeling that the audience sort of wanted to devour him whole. I didn't stick around for the special CD signing afterwards but I hope they had excellent security or Joshua's untucked black dress shirt was likely shredded from his "concert violinist bad boy" body before he was even fully seated in his chair.

"You know, he's making fun of us," Eric commented.

Yep. And we love it.


*This actually happens to be one of the songs that Emerson's musical "laptop" plays as well so, as it turned out, even the symphony was not a safe escape from horrible-baby-music-land.