Birthdays Abound

When I was a child, I used to say that I got the best birthday present ever because the earth gave me Spring.

Frankly, since my birthday is in the first week of In Like a Lion March, Spring is usually more hypothetical than real. Spring by Comparison.

This year, however, my birthday, and the weekend immediately following it, was drenched in beautiful bright sunlight and mellow breezes.

And, BONUS! We got our lovely daylight savings time back, HOORAY!

I know it’s fashionable to hate DST for messing with the god-given circadian rhythm and all, but whatevah SUCKAS! I win! It’s back! My plebian need to have daylight after I get off work trumps your need to have undamaged circadian rhythms. If your rhythm can’t handle a little syncopation, then it’s just not as cool as mine.

Actually, I maintain that if we simply stayed on DST then everyone’s life would be perfect. It is not healthy to spend all day at work and have NO DAYLIGHT after you’re done. Would it be any better if job America simply moved our business hours one hour earlier and later with the seasons? We’d still have to get up earlier…

So, why do we have to go OFF DST in the first place? Hours and clocks are just arbitrary measurements of time, anyway. We made them up in the first place, why is it so bad if we just admit that we made a mistake, that 2 am is one hour earlier than previously thought and that DST corrects this fallacy and stop with the winter time madness. After all, we spend more time of the year on DST than we do on standard time.

But I digress.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HIPIEGRL!!! (everyone go tell her happy birthday, too!)

Because the lovely hipiegrl’s birthday is so close to mine, we decided to combine birthday celebrations this year into one gigantic Pirate Princess Classy Cocktail Birthday Extravaganza. There was a plethora of rhinestone tiaras. There was sophisticated jazz. There were balloons on the floor and fancy fingerfoods. There were people in dressy clothes and a punch called It’ll Get You DRUNK! Punch (crabbed from a recipe Klove and I first encountered at Keri and Cristy’s house: lemonaide and blueberry vodka with Hipiegrl’s contribution of pomegranate juice to make it pink and sweet). There were red roses and mouth bling (it’s a party in your mouth!)

It was probably the best party I’ve been to in a long time, and it was certainly the best birthday party I’ve EVER had. (I am not generally a fan of my own birthday parties, in fact, I normally forget to tell people that it’s a birthday party and then they get all betrayed looking when they don’t tell you happy birthday and then later a birthday cake appears…)

It was left up to me to invite my own guests. Klove was busy with catering and Hipiegrl had already invited her own people and our joint friends. What this meant is that I forgot to invite ANYONE until, uh, the night before/morning of. Even though we’d been planning the party for weeks. Even though I was thoroughly expecting all my friends to be there AND even though I KNEW it was my job to invite everyone. Somehow the two conditions failed to connect in my brain. “Wow, I wonder if I’ll get to see so and so friend at my party… uh wait… no, no I won’t, because I never invited anyone to my party, shoot, the party’s in 4 hours what kind of a phone call is that… ‘uh, hi, so I’m having a giant birthday party and I’m calling because I forgot to invite you — well, I forgot to invite anyone, so it’s not like I just forgot you — anyway, wanna come? Oh, by the way it’s not going to be a good place for children, so you’ll need to find a babysitter in the next, oh, 3 hours, and don’t forget to pick up your cocktail dress and your pirate hat from the cleaners…’ “ Having that conversation 20 times the day of my party was so not going to happen. So, if you’re my friend, and you live here, and you’re sitting there hurt that you weren’t invited: it’s not you, it’s me, I’m a dork and I was too embarrassed to call you.

But, yeah, our joint friends and Hipiegrl’s friends all made it to the party and it was a blast. And I didn’t even have a hangover the next morning WHOO HOO!

The highlight of the party were the two made-from-scratch (not even from a box, but from flour, sugar, and eggs and such… even the frosting and ganache!) cakes that Klove whipped up while she was letting me sleep in on Saturday morning.

The one, pictured above, was a strawberry margarita cake. Strawberry cake (with REAL strawberries in the batter!) with lime frosting! The other was a fairytale castle cake with yellow cake, chocolate chips, and a semi-sweet chocolate ganache coating.

So, yeah, I guess you could say that I had a happy birthday. It felt good to be happy.