All About Me - And Then Some
I just wanted to wish you a Very Happy Birthday! Enjoy your day off, and I wish you all the happiness your heart can hold in the coming year – I know you’ll have that because your dream is coming true already! Enjoy your special day.
:-) Kirsten
Photo courtesy internet search
On Friday night, I went out with some friends. Big deal, you might say. Well, let me put it this way. I almost always work job #2 on Friday nights, so having a night off when I can actually sleep in the next morning is extremely rare.
Anyway, the plan was that Sparkling Butterfly, HikerGirl and I were supposed to go to this open house thingy at a jewelry store. We would pay the admission, ogle jewelry and the Chippendale dancers that were supposed to be there, and have a fabulous time. After eating a delicious dinner at a restaurant that HikerGirl was craving, we headed off to this jewelry store. Turns out it was a breast cancer benefit. I don’t have a problem with that, I think charity events are a great thing, but there were so many people there that we couldn’t get to the jewelry cases to drool on them! Plus, the Chippendales only made an appearance and were leaving when we came in. So we only stayed a short time and headed down the street to a restaurant/bar with nice club chairs and sofas and drank and talked some girl talk for a few hours. Those impromtu gatherings are what I like best, since it seems that plans, however much hyped up they are, never meet the expectations one has for a fabulous time.
In other news, this week I’m super busy at job#2, since I am the only sales clerk currently employed there. We have the 3 members of management and me, and I’m very very part time since I already have a full time job. So I’ll be working an additional night at the store during the week. I’m already Monday nights at the office, and now 2 nights during the week and Sundays at the store. Just what I need when I’m trying to move – which is in 5 days! But the extra money will be nice, even if I’m too exhausted to do anything with it.
I’m almost done packing up for the move. I quit a bit sooner than I wanted to yesterday because I ran out of bubble wrap. I have a bunch of plastic tubs that I had in the storage closet, and I’m using those to pack instead of running all over town trying to scrounge up free boxes. Tonight my roommate tells me that she had 2 of the same exact color, size and brand as the ones I have, also stored in the storage closet. You tell me this now, when I’m just about done packing? And if in fact they are yours, why the heck did you put them in the closet with mine, all nested in together, and not say anything about it until now? Did you even think to label them so we’ll know what belongs to whom? I mean, our dishes are easy. Yours are ugly, mine aren’t. But plastic tubs? So now I do have to scrounge a up a couple more boxes, because I had exaclty enough plastic tubs to finish the packing I have left to do. Just add it to my still-growing list of reasons why I will never live with a roommate ever again.
When I finally get all my stuff out of here I’m going to be ecstatic. Exhausted, but ecstatic. My apartment will be 100% my domain. No questions about what belongs to whom, no making tons of noise when I’m watching tv, no washing the part on my vacuum that is clearly labeled DO NOT WASH, no germ discrimination, no improperly washed dishes (ask me about the coffee rings in my allegedly clean mugs – and I don’t even drink coffee!). No, none of that. It will all be MINE! My mess, my silence, my properly washed and maintained dishes and appliances, and most of all, my sanity. Oh yeah, counting the hours. As of this writing, approximately 112 hours until lease signing. :-D
My birthday is coming up, and while I was reading a blog that mentioned something about a birthday, I was reminded of one time I decided to celebrate a friend’s birthday. It was his 26th, not a notable birthday by any means. But since Officer Friend is approximately 2 months and 23 days older than I am, I decided to make fun of the fact that he was aging faster than me. I bought a 4-inch decorated cake from the supermarket, managed to fit “Happy Birthday Officer Friend” on the top, and put 26 candles on it. Now, that many candles on a larger cake would have been no big deal, but on a cake that small, it produced one large flame, lots of black smoke, and left a sheet of wax on the top. I had to open the window to prevent the smoke alarm from going off, which was not pleasant in the late weeks of a New England winter.
Within the past decade, both of my parents have celebrated their 50th birthdays. Of course, with a milestone birthday such as this, one must be given a surprise party. My dad’s was pretty typical of his gatherings, and the surprise would have gone off without a hitch were it not for my impatient nephew, who was not quite 6 at the time. About 10 minutes before getting ready to leave the house, Bubba asked, “Papa, when are we leaving for your surprise party?” So, 2 years later when my mom’s milestone birthday rolled around, it was decided that the best way to protect the top secret plans was to keep Bubba out of the loop altogether.
My mom’s party was very well planned, and boy was she surprised. See, she was planning on going down to the mid-Atlantic states to visit her oldest brother, whose birthday is less that a week from hers. They would be going to a classic, popular steak house in the area for dinner. I called up my uncle and we got our evil heads together and decided to invite a few more people along – mostly relatives in the area whom my mom didn’t get to visit with very often. Also along for the ride was my stepdad, who pretty much never made the trip to visit the relatives, and my sister, who also didn’t get down there often, if at all.
I managed to use my busy schedule and lots of errands as an excuse to not meet my mom at the house before heading to the restaurant, which was important since I had my sister and stepdad in tow, and we also stopped at Great Auntie’s house to pick her up. We gathered at the restaurant and waited for everyone else, and I was to get a call from my uncle when they were on their way – he would call with the ploy that he’d be putting in his name for a table. Everything went smoothly. My mom had Bubba with her, and he was really clueless. When they walked into the room, my mom blurted out, “What’s my husband doing here?” as we all yelled SURPRISE! Oh, it worked, she was surprised. After threatening me a few times, we had a grand old time, Mom got to catch up with relatives, and I kept all the organizational things under control.
My own birthdays have been memorable, but in a I-wish-I-could-forget kind of way. There was the year I came home to an apartment I was sharing with one of my best friends and found my birthday card ripped up and a note that said to get out. There was the year that my then boyfriend left a message on my answering machine saying I was no longer welcome in his life. There were a few others that weren’t quite so bad, but now I don’t place too much emphasis or expectations on my birthday. And no, I don’t want to explain these incidents and rehash the past. I’m just trying to get through each and every day and trying to make it a good day, whether it’s my birthday or any of the other 364 days in the year.
Now, getting back to the surprise parties. My mom made many threats that evening, mostly hinting at her need for revenge. The following year, I was getting ready for my move to Las Vegas, so I wanted to have a party, a combo Going Away/1st Annual 29th Birthday party. Since I had sold my home, my mom would be hosting this party. I had lots of things to do, so I gave her a guest list and how to contact these people. Then, a few days before the party rolled around, she tried her best to be sly and ask me if I could come over on Saturday afternoon with a really vague mention of something to do. I told her it wouldn’t work – for one, I had given her a guest list and told her when to hold the party. I also wasn’t going to let my guard down anytime soon, so if she wanted to throw a surprise party for me, wait about 20 years. I might let my guard down by then.
So she moved on to my uncle. He was turning 60 that year, so mom thought she could exact revenge on him for his part in the planning. I told her not to do it, once someone is past 50 it’s just not safe. My uncle may still be a world traveller, but I know his ticker ain’t what it used to be. I love the guy, and I want him around for many more years. So I did what I could to diffuse the surprise element. Go ahead, call me a spoiler, but I only did it out of concern for his health. If he was younger, I ‘d be all for it. But I also wanted to prove to my mom that she will never be able to plan a surprise party as well as I can.
When I was in high school, my mom wanted to plan a surprise party for my stepdad for a milestone birthday he was having. She invited his twin brother to visit us from his home in Moose-land, so Uncle Brother and his wife came down and the 4 of them went out to dinner. For some odd reason, Stepdad actually believed that I was staying home to study on a Saturday night. Fool. I’ve heard enough stories about him in high school and college to know that he’s seriously losing it if he bought that. What I really did was let in guests, go with one of the guests to pick up a keg (at 17, there was no way I could do this myself), and set everything up. Meanwhile, Stepdad and Uncle Brother ate pretty much everything on the dessert cart. (I have previously mentioned that my stepdad is a human garbage disposal; that trait is also seen in his twin.) When the group arrived back at the house, no one noticed the unusually large number of cars parked nearby. And the guests of honor certainly didn’t smell the chocolate sheet cake that was permeating the air. Also not noticed were the large number of people hushing each other in the dining room, until stepdad walked in and everyone yelled out the obligatory surprise party greeting. After recovering from his near heart attack, he turned to my mom, told her he hated her, and made a vow to himself to be a bit more observant about things.
Here’s what I’ve learned about surprise parties and how to have a successful one:
1. Micro-manage the details. It’s the only way to keep everything under control and keep the cat in the bag.
2. Be careful when involving minors. It might be fun to let the kids in on the planning because they get so excited, but their innocent honesty is just the sort of thing that will spoil things here.
3. Never attempt revenge against a master surprise party planner. You’ll never get it.
4. One self-adhesive Depends undergarment can hold a very large amount of beer.
About birthdays in general, really, they aren’t that important. It’s just another day that just happens to be listed on your driver’s license, so don’t let expectations get you down. Don’t rely on others for the best birthday ever, and don’t let people who inadvertently (or purposely) ruin your day with seriously bad timing get to you. Get over it, get drunk and eat fattening food, and feel better tomorrow – or the day after, once you get over that hangover.
I should be getting to bed, I still need my rest to avoid a common cold relapse. But I can’t resist, this internet thing is such a huge time vacuum!
I have a friend. Actually, I have many friends but one friend in particular who lives in the Great White North, eh. Now, this friend tends to get a crazy silly streak once in awhile. One day I was at work and all of a sudden, my inbox beeped with a new message. A few new messages. Actually, dozens of new messages. And they all said the same thing. Subject: Spam. Of course, seeing who the sender was, I simply rolled my eyes and laughed. From then on, Spam would be a running joke with us.
After the high volume spam, GP sent me spam in other forms. I got a nice .gif image of a Spam can. I got the .wav file of the Monty Python spam sketch. I also got the script of said sketch. I joked that I’d get him back one day. He lives in a better off neighborhood in a large Canadian city, so I joked that I’d have a pallet of spam delivered to his house. Wouldn’t the neighbors love that – a whole pallet of Spam rotting in the driveway of the vegan’s house. But, I couldn’t raise the money or figure out the logistics of sending that large a meat shipment over international borders. Then one day I found the perfect comeback. It was legal. It had to work. Of course, the thing cost more to ship to Canada than it did to actually buy it, but it was still affordable. What was it, you ask? It was (drumroll, please) a pallet of Spam. Not an actual pallet, but a notecube with tiny cans of Spam printed on the sides displayed on a little wooden pallet. Oh yeah. Point for the American!
He loved it, of course. I had won the Spam wars. But, he couldn’t sit silently. A few weeks later, I received a box from Amazon. I didn’t remember ordering anything. Then I noticed it wasn’t from Amazon.com. It was from Amazon.ca. Big difference, and I only knew one person who would send me something from there. GP himself. I received a lovely illustrated children’s book about a family pet with a particularly malodorous problem. It was different and unexpected, and my then 4-year-old niece loved it.
We’ve called a truce in the Spam wars, but every now and then there’s a bit of friendly fire. We just like to keep things interesting.
