The lighter side of life – staying in touch with friends and family by celebrating the ordinary.
Happy Birthday, John
John had his birthday over the weekend! All together now, to the tune of the birthday song: “Happy Birthday to yoooou! Last night your doggies puked. Good thing it wasn’t poo-oo, happy birthday to you!”
And, for my kid’s benefit, because they know the other tune: “Happy birthday, happy, happy birthday, You’ve got one dog eating the other dog’s puke, YUM! Happy birthday, happy, happy birthday, this is your day to have…a…lot…of…FUN!”
John had said he wanted a golden monkey for his birthday, and I told him he already had one and I started jumping around making monkey noises, “oo-oo-oo-oo!”
“Happy birthday to you, you live in a zoo, you look like a monkey and your wife is one too! Oo!”
As if that wasn’t bad enough, immediately after getting the dog issue on the carpet cleaned up (yes, that was real), we noticed was that it was oddly dark for a summer morning. We went out onto the porch to investigate. It was raining! As you know, rain is rare in New Mexico. It’s particularly rare in the morning in the middle of summer. It was like, whaaaa? We stood and looked at it in awe and puzzlement. We even walked out into it, just to be sure. Yep, rain.
Usually we’re happy to see rain. But we had a special outing planned for John’s birthday. We are members of the Albuquerque Biopark, and love to walk in the botanical garden. It’s been closed due to the coronavirus, but they had just opened it for member’s only, with reservations in order to limit the number of people at a time, and masks were required. We had a reservation for 9:30 that morning. We decided we’d go anyway, even if it was raining.
As we were getting ready, I decided to blow dry my hair. I don’t usually bother. It usually dries in a few minutes, as our humidity level is typically somewhere in the teens (yes, below 20%, routinely). But with it raining, and with somewhere to be, I thought I’d break out the blow dryer. Suddenly we were hit by a crack of thunder so loud, that even over the noise of the blow dryer I nearly jumped out of my skin. I immediately dropped the blow dryer without even attempting to turn it off. I had some vague fleeting thought that if I were to be hit by lightning it would be doubly worse if I was using a plugged-in appliance at the same time. (Isn’t that something our mothers warned us about?) After the rolls of thunder faded, I gingerly picked up the hair dryer, turned it off, and decided my hair was dry enough for the day.
By the time we got to the biopark, the rain had stopped and it was beautiful.
Lol, completely blue skies and it doesn’t even look wet. I bet you don’t believe me that it was raining an hour before.
The indoor sections, such as the arboretums were closed. They also closed some of the outdoor areas that had narrow walkways and constrictions, such the children’s area.
I was tired after the biopark – I don’t have the energy I used to have. Luckily I had already made John’s birthday lemon bars. I made lemon bars because recently I had made a chocolate cake and it totally fell apart. I have no idea what happened! John wasn’t very impressed with the chocolate cake crumbs. If it weren’t for Darren they’d still be languishing in the refrigerator, but Darren has been happily eating the cake crumbles in a bowl with ice cream.
For birthday lunch we got take-out Thai food, yum, yum! Curry, green papaya salad, drunken noodles, mango with sticky rice and Thai iced teas.
Darren had wanted to make John a special birthday breakfast, but we didn’t have time before our biopark reservation (I am not an early riser nowadays). So the next morning Darren made us German pancakes for breakfast. Here’s the recipe:
German pancakes (makes 2)
Melt 1/4 cube of butter into each of 2 glass pie pans. Mix together 1 cup milk, 1 cup flour, 3 eggs, 2 tablespoons sugar, and a dash of salt. Pour batter into the pans on top of the melted butter. Bake at 400 degrees for 20 minutes or until poofed up and browned around the edges. Serve with lime juice and powdered sugar for toppings.
Mmmm, those were good! All in all, a pretty good birthday, considering!
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