Tag: birthday

Birthday Trip – Day 3

The third day we spent on vacation was my actual birthday. To celebrate the day, we planned to spend a few hours wandering the scenic streets of downtown Carmel By The Sea. That’s the actual name of the town, and there are unlimited t-shirts and hats in every store with “Carmel By The Sea” printed on them to prove it.

My daughter, EM1, who had delayed the departure from our hotel every day since we arrived in Monterey, promised that on my birthday we would be on our way to Carmel no later than eleven o’clock in the morning.

At twelve-thirty, we were in the truck and headed for Carmel.

It was our earliest start all week, so I’m going to call that one a win.

The drive took 25 minutes. Ten minutes to get to Carmel, then fifteen minutes circling and trying to find a place to park. Once we had the truck situated in a parking lot that we were (almost) certain was free and would not result in our vehicle being towed away, we went for a little jaunt.

The first order of business, as it is every day with my family, was to find food. Whenever we travel, we always seem to start our day by roaming randomly like a pack of seagulls circling a dump, looking around for anything edible. We found a tiny cottage-looking place called The Tuck Box, that advertised breakfast, brunch, and tea. It was an adorable restaurant with barely enough room to fit five tables and a couple chairs.

We went in.

A friendly young woman greeted us, then said, “I’m sorry, but we don’t accept credit cards. It’s cash only. Do you have cash?”

Affronted that she had basically accused me of being too poor to eat in her mouse-sized restaurant, I blurted, “Of course I have cash. Who doesn’t have cash?”

She seated us and I spent the next five minutes making the kids dump out their purses looking for enough loose change to have breakfast. Now that I had made an ass of myself, I did not want to have to slink out with my tail between my legs, making some lame excuse like, “I forgot I have a doctor’s appointment in five minutes, otherwise I would totally stay and give you cash like a normal person. Because I have cash in my pockets. Lots of it. You should see how much cash is there.”

Fortunately, we were able to scrape together enough to stay. The kids had plenty of money. Probably from all those years of keeping my change whenever I gave them $20 to buy a three-dollar item.

Breakfast was actually quite nice. And expensive. But we had enough to pay for it. I even left a couple of spare nickels for a tip.

After breakfast, we did a little sight-seeing. There was a lot to see, but most of it was the same thing over and over. I don’t want to claim that Carmel is pretentious as far as towns go, but let’s just say all we found were art galleries and wine tasting rooms, occasionally broken up by pubs, coffee houses, and clothing boutiques.

See? Not pretentious at all.

After about thirty minutes, I was done with art galleries. It was time to hit the stores.

The rest of the day was a shopping day. It was my birthday, after all. Buying stuff on your birthday is a thing, right?

Only problem was, I wasn’t buying stuff for me. I spent a lot of money on my birthday, but somehow it was my wife and kids accumulating presents while I did it. For example: my wife got a lovely, four-hundred-dollar purse. My daughter, EM1, got a slightly smaller purse for only $200. The day before, I bought EM2 a $300 pair of sunglasses after EM1 discovered the glasses she wanted were already gone. Both girls got new shoes, shirts, sweaters with “Carmel By The Sea” emblazoned on them, sweaters without “Carmel By The Sea” emblazoned on them, shorts, tops, and assorted souvenirs.

And guess who got to carry the bags?

At one point, we were in a three-level, shopping complex. My wife and the girls were inside yet another clothing store. I had pretty much given up on life at that point and sat down on a bench in the courtyard, surrounded by pink, lavender, and gold-colored bags. An elderly couple strolled past while I was sitting there. They both gave me a good, long look, then began to laugh.

The man waved a hand at me and said, “Get used to it.” They both laughed again, then disappeared into an elevator which I assume took them straight down to Hell. Or at least down to the first floor of the shopping mall which was where the coffee shop was located.

We were only in Carmel for a few hours, but it was a long, tiring day. I wasn’t completely ignored, however. I got a baseball cap.

It was on sale.

Oh, and lest I forget, EM2 also bought me a churro from a street vendor while we were walking through a farmer’s market. She paid for it with her own money. After the sunglasses, shoes, clothing, and multiple meals she had received over the past three days, a one-dollar fried stick of bread seemed to her to be a fair trade. More than fair, apparently, since while I was eating it she looked at me and said, “Well?”

“Well, what?” I asked.

“Aren’t you going to say thank you?”

And like a stripper on a pole who is just happy to be receiving attention of any kind, I said, “Thank you.”

We returned to the hotel, and that was pretty much the end of the day. We all ended up going to bed early that night. Why? Well, I’m glad you asked.

We all went to bed early because EM1, the lovely child that had consistently delayed our morning departures by two or more hours every morning during our vacation, needed to be at work the next day in Sacramento by eleven o’clock in the morning. This necessitated a departure no later than 6 AM in order to get her home in time to make it to work.

Amazingly, we did succeed in leaving that morning on time. We got the truck packed and were headed to Sacramento as the sun rose over the hills to the east. Five minutes into the drive home, everybody was snoring in their seats, fast asleep, while I drove and sang quietly to myself:

“Happy Birthday to me…”

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Another Year Older

This week, I celebrated another birthday. Perhaps celebrated is too strong of a term as the truth is closer to I “tolerated” another birthday.

I turned 54 on Monday. This isn’t a milestone by any means. Nobody thinks of 54 as a goal or accomplishment. Nobody is going to go skydiving at 54 to prove they’re still young, or that they still “got it” (whatever “it” is). It is simply another annual marker on the slow journey to acknowledgement of our own mortality.

As a side note, I have no plans to go skydiving at any age. I don’t consider myself a daredevil. I get plenty of excitement in my life just leaving the house and standing 5 feet away from a total stranger who decided not to wear a mask that day.

Like any birthday of no particular note, it went about the way you would expect. For example: I woke up to a surprise birthday breakfast. When I got out of bed, my wife kissed me, wished me happy birthday then drove away to go to work. Both girls were still in bed and didn’t stir until sometime around noon.

No breakfast.

Surprise!

That was alright, though. I hadn’t really expected anything. The plan was to enjoy a really nice dinner that evening anyway. We had even ordered a shipment of my favorite sparkling wine the week before so I could have a glass on my birthday.

Instead of a case of wine on my birthday, I got an email stating the weather was too hot, so the winery was postponing the delivery until the weather cooled down. I’m guessing that means sometime in October. Hopefully, it will arrive in time to celebrate Halloween.

Damned global warming.

Not everything went wrong that day, of course. In fact, most of the day was quite pleasant. My wife gave me a very nice set of wine glasses and tumblers as a gift. I think it was her passive-aggressive way of saying “You’ve been drinking an awful lot lately and I figured if you’re going to kill your liver you should at least do it with a clean glass.”

She’s very thoughtful that way.

Dinner was take-out from my favorite Chinese restaurant. I even got to pick two of the items we ordered so it was a particular treat this time. Usually, I just accept what arrives and consider myself fortunate that I’m allowed to pick through the scraps after everyone else has filled their plates. I’m like the runtiest lion cub waiting for everyone else in the pride to finish mauling the wildebeest. I know my place in the pecking order.

After dinner came an amazing chocolate cake. I don’t usually throw plugs into this blog, but the cake came from Joyfully Baking and Catering and they did an incredible job. I would recommend this place (and this cake) to anyone.

If it bothers you that I just put a commercial in the middle of my weekly rant, remember that you’re reading this for free. If you want a commercial-free blog, I would be happy to discuss a small monthly fee to make that happen.

And now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Before I was allowed to cut the cake, my wife lit candles and the whole family sang happy birthday (mostly) non-sarcastically. There were only five candles on the cake instead of 54, but that was for several good reasons.

One) 54 candles would generate an awful lot of heat and probably set off the smoke detector and fire sprinklers.

Two) The number 5, despite my advance physical age, more accurately depicts my current emotional and mental status.

And Three) There were only five candles in the junk drawer, and nobody had bothered to think about buying candles the last time we were at the store.

I blew out the candles, cut myself a ridiculously large piece of cake, then proceeded to push it down my throat despite the fact that I was still full from eating too much dinner. When I was finished with my cake, I waddled over to the couch and collapsed into the cushions, feeling like an overly-stuffed reject from Build-a-Bear.

The remainder of the evening was spent dozing in and out of a food coma while the kids fought over who should have control of the TV remote. I don’t recall the final outcome of the struggle, but I have some vague memories of subtitles on the television screen and listening to a foreign language that was probably Korean. If you are a regular reader, that last part should be no surprise to you.

All things considered, it was a good day. I can certainly think of worse ways to spend my birthday.

And the best part is now that it’s over, I have an entire year before I have to do it all over again.

That, and there is a ton of leftover chocolate cake in the refrigerator.

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By Special Request

For EM1’s birthday this year, she made a special request. She did not want a birthday cake like every other year of her life. This time, she wanted me to make Macarons.

“No sweat. Happy to do it,” I told her.

My initial thought was that Macarons are like fussy cookies. I have baked lots of cookies in my day, so this should be a piece of cake (if you’ll pardon the pun). After a little bit of research, I was quickly dissuaded of the idea that the little French sweets were anything like cookies. They are nothing like cookies. They may be flat and round, but the tricky bastards are only camouflaging themselves like an innocent cookie when in reality they are evil and do not belong in a normal human being’s kitchen.

Okay, maybe not actually evil, but the rest of my opinion stands.

My second thought was, instead of making them, I’ll just go out and buy some. It’ll be easier and I’ll just tell EM1 that I made them. Problem solved.

Until I started looking at prices.

Have you ever bought a Macaron? They are quite a bit more expensive than I expected, and since I had no desire to mortgage the house just to buy cookies (sorry … not cookies) I was back to square one. Only, I was actually further back than square one, since I now realized that this project might take a little more time and effort than I had originally planned.

Turned out, I was wrong about that assumption as well.

It took A LOT more time and effort than I originally planned.

I found a recipe online called “Basic French Macarons – perfect for beginners.” There are so many oxymorons in that statement I don’t even know where to start. The word “basic” should be nowhere in that sentence, and “perfect for beginners” is so misleading the author should be sued for libel.

There were only seven ingredients in the recipe, so in the beginning I thought I had a chance of creating something edible. The world is so full of horrible things that I should know better by now than to ever hope something will turn out the way it was promised. For such a small list of ingredients, there was an inordinate amount of sifting, separating, whisking, whipping, and folding.

I know what those words usually mean, but when applying them to baking I’m a little lost. In general, if I can’t do it with a bowl and a spoon, it just ain’t happening.

I suppose it might have helped if I had read the instructions the day before and had some idea of what I was doing before I started. The recipe called for room temperature butter and eggs. I keep both those items in the refrigerator, so the first step of making Macarons for me was “set butter and eggs on counter and go watch an hour of Netflix.”

That was the part of the baking experience that worked out okay. I had time to start season 5 of American Horror Story. Score one for the Chef!

Next, I pre-heated the oven and mixed my Macaron ingredients into the mixing bowl. The mixture came out like a lumpy green oatmeal. I am pretty sure that is not the desired texture, however I was not about wait another hour while I brought two more eggs up to room temperature. I was committed and already stuck in enemy territory.

I placed the oddly rigid mass into a piping bag and squirted out two dozen circles of batter on two baking sheets. Okay, if I’m being honest, I piped out two dozen ovals, triangles, and various blobs. You would think circles would be easy.

And you would be very, very wrong.

I read the next line in the recipe and it said, “let the Macarons sit out on the counter for up to a couple hours, until batter becomes stiff and rubbery.”

Crap.

I turned the oven back off and sat down to watch episode two of season five of American Horror Story. Baking had become an awful lot like binge watching television.

When the batter was ready, I turned the oven back on, waited for it to heat up (while watching more TV), then popped the first of the baking sheets in to cook for the recommended 17 to 20 minutes.

After which, I sat back down on the couch to finish watching episode 3.

Twenty-five minutes later, I pulled out my dark brown, crumbling Macarons from the smoking oven.

Cookie sheet number two went in, and this time, I paid more attention to the time. At the end of 17 minutes, I pulled out the oddly shaped, but properly baked, lumps of batter.

As they cooled, I made the filling. This turned out to be pretty straight forward. Butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla. Even I didn’t screw up that combination.

By the time I was finished baking EM1’s requested birthday treat, I had a plate with seven incredibly sad looking Macarons. But they were homemade, as promised, and they looked almost edible. Of course, I couldn’t try them out myself since there weren’t enough survivors for sampling. I can only hope they tasted better than they looked.

They probably didn’t.

It was a lot of work and I admit that initially I was a little bothered by EM1’s odd request for a birthday dessert. A cake would have been much easier and cheaper, not to mention I could have made it in half the time it took to make the Macarons.

I’m not mad at her, though. With only seven Macarons on the plate, EM1 ate them all on her own.

And I think that is punishment enough for anybody.

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Happy Birthday to Me

Last weekend, I celebrated yet another birthday. On Saturday, I turned WTF years old.

It would be nice if people reached a certain age and birthdays just stopped happening, but unfortunately that’s not how the process works. You get a new one every year whether you want it or not.

I started my special day by waking up before anyone else in the house had started moving. Ordinarily in these circumstances, I would immediately begin making as much noise as possible to wake up the kids. They have an annoying habit of sleeping in until noon if left alone and I get a great deal of pleasure out of making their lives miserable. This day was different, however. I figured a quiet house was just what I needed.

Breakfast was a birthday bowl of cold cereal. A birthday bowl of cereal is like a normal bowl of cereal except there are usually a few more tears in it. I debated putting a candle in the bowl to make it more festive, but I’m pretty sure a candle won’t light after it has been submerged in milk. To add to the air of desperation, I had to eat my breakfast with an oversized serving spoon because no one had bothered to do any dishes that week. That’s okay, though. I managed just fine since I have a big mouth. I know I have a big mouth because people have been telling me that my entire life.

Things did pick up in the afternoon. As a gift to me, my family took me to a movie and a restaurant for dinner. I got to choose the movie, and I got to pick my favorite restaurant. As an added bonus, I also got to pay for everything.

Happy birthday to me!

While we were at the theater, I bought some popcorn. I always have popcorn when I see a movie. It’s just my thing. Usually when my wife and I get popcorn we argue over whether or not to put butter on it. I prefer it dry, since I don’t like the plasticky burnt taste of the fake butter. I also hate how greasy it makes my fingers. My wife loves the stuff for some unknowable reason and insists that it be used to ruin an otherwise perfectly good tub of popcorn.

We usually argue in line for a few minutes and when we get to the front counter, she tells the kid working the snack bar to add the butter. This was my birthday, though. So, on this day when we got to the kid behind the counter … she told him to add butter.

Then I paid for the snacks.

Happy birthday to me!

I enjoyed the movie, and dinner afterwards was pleasant. I swore the kids to secrecy about my birthday. I didn’t want them telling the waiter just so they could watch dad squirm in his chair as the restaurant staff sang an offkey version of a birthday song while holding a melting blob of ice cream with a candle in it. I enjoy a free dessert as much as the next guy, but I don’t care to be the center of attention in a circus like that.

So, while we were eating, I told the waiter that it was EM2’s birthday.

After dinner, we headed home for a quiet evening. A little late-night television, a glass of wine, and two kids laughing and arguing while they watched videos on their phones.

And there was cake.

Lest anyone think we forgot the most important part of any birthday celebration, my wife baked me a lovely, homemade, chocolate birthday cake. She even managed to find a pink box to put it in and a sticker with a barcode to put on the side of the box. She always goes the extra mile because she loves me so much.

My wife covered every square inch of the cake’s surface with candles, then applied a blowtorch to it for three minutes to get them all lit. Okay, that part’s a lie. It’s just my attempt at an old age joke. The reality, though simpler, was actually much more depressing.

My wife rummaged in the junk drawer, located a single candle at the bottom of the clutter, and stuck it in the cake. The family sang Happy Birthday to me, hurrying to get through it before they completely lost interest in what they were doing. Somehow my daughters managed to get through the song without ever once looking up from their cellphones. Maybe they just forgot the words and had to read them on their screens.

After fourteen or fifteen attempts, along with a five-minute rest break when I got dizzy and started to hyperventilate, I blew out the candle. (Yup. Another old age joke.)

The kids both grabbed a piece of cake and disappeared upstairs to watch a Korean soap opera. My wife took two bites of her cake, set it on the counter and started answering work e-mails on her cellphone. I got to work cleaning up the mess in the kitchen.

Ah, yes. I can’t wait to do it all again next year.

Happy birthday to me!

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Enjoying Deep Dark Thoughts? Follow me on Facebook so you don’t miss a post. Just go to my page and click the “Like” button to receive updates on my blog and other projects.

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