Happy Birthday to Me
In the first place I am Not Sober. There was not only champagne, with which Halley and I dealt robustly, there being only minor help from Peter and no help at all from Nina, but because with Halley present we had at least some chance of getting through a bottle of champagne, there was also a bottle of sweet wine to go with the chocolate pudding. Which pudding was AMAZING, by the way. AMAZING. . . . but I’ll get to that in a minute.
So. Um. Have I mentioned that I am Not Sober? The champagne was also . . . nice. Really nice. Every time someone got the bottle out again I said ‘yes please’. I’ve also been on the phone kind of a lot today. So now it’s late and I haven’t started the blog post and . . . I think I have mentioned I am Not Sober. . . . Where shall I begin?*
I received an Excellent Birthday Card this morning which wished me Happy Tea in my Teapot of Life** and that the sender further hoped I would celebrate my birthday with chocolate, champagne, sunshine and roses—adding well, perhaps not roses in November. . . .
HA.
Old Blush, AKA Parson's Monthly, and she is. If it's a mild winter I'll have roses on Christmas.
There was remarkably little sunshine though.***
And, speaking of pink, which I often am, Nina and I had declared that the dress code for tonight’s party would be Jeans and Bling.
Bling. And a pink pullover. Of course. Some verities are eternal.
I rarely wear the pocket watch because I’m too dumb to use it. It’s built so that if you pick it up by the loop in your right hand you will be reading the clockface correctly. I can never remember this, so I pick it up and then have to look frantically for the twelve and get tangled up in the chain while I’m trying to readjust. The bottom pendant does in fact date from my childhood in Japan. The characters are supposed to say something like happiness† and long life but I always wonder if really they say something like Public Restroom This Way or I Am an Apple Dumpling. It’s still a pretty pendant.
Oh, and shoes. You may have seen these before. They are among those that only come out for special occasions.
Special occasion shoes.
PRESENTS.
The voice lessons are invisible.
I have totally failed to get an effective photo of my fabulous new black cotton-canvas trench coat. I was greatly hampered in my attempt to record the evening’s festivities by the fact that Peter has refused to have anything to do with my no-longer-new fancy-schmancy camera. SIIIIIIIGH. So you’ll just have to imagine. It’s an excellent black cotton-canvas trench coat AND THE SLEEVES ARE LONG ENOUGH. In my world this does not happen.
You'll just have to imagine it being fabulous.
Nina and Halley gave me a funny card
Wow. Thinking. Wow.
And a book on . . .
KNITTING.
Hee hee hee hee hee. Well, since there’s a Large Visible Shelf of Knitting Books immediately to my left as I sit at the kitchen table these days this may give people ideas.
And then . . . the food. This was the starter: Pecorino, Asparagus and Broad Bean Salad with Lemon Oil and Caramelised Onions. If you look closely you may observe that one quarter of it is missing its slabs of pale cheese. Usually when you leave the dairy item out of a dish that calls for it you can tell. It’s not very interesting or it’s unbalanced or something—I’ve gotten a bit testy on the subject after years of being the party pooper but our local caterer is just one person in a small town and the choices were not vast. I figured anything with asparagus and broad beans was going to be okay. And in fact it was brilliant.
Mmmmmmmm.
The fish, which was another compromise since Nina is a vegetarian, was also top notch and sublime—sea bass with ginger. And then . . . and then. . . .
MMMMMMMMM. (Yes, all right, I got the plate with the roses on it.)
The pudding. Totally amazing. Totally totally totally amazing. It’s a sort of almost-solid very gooey chocolate mousse further enhanced by a chocolate short crust. I won’t be able to button my jeans tomorrow . . . but that may be the champagne. And the sweet wine.†† Alcohol is distressingly caloric.
It was worth it.
* Probably not with the fact that Awakening: the Dreamlike Git has hung itself and refuses to unhang, so after wearing little indentations in Astarte’s screen with retries I wrote to BigFishGames customer contact and am receiving really helpful advice like that hot spots are sometimes quite fiddly and I should spend some time CAREFULLY trying to attach stupid token A to stupid large object B but if I continue to have problems to pleeeeeeeez get back in touch because they’re here to help. Snarl.
** My Teapot of Life is yellow. The funny thing is that I have a gigantic yellow teapot.
*** But no vampires either. It probably balances out.
† Or possibly happy tea.
†† Which survived its meeting with that chocolate. It deserves a medal.
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